The creator of Twitter was welcomed Thursday by a class of SF State public relations students. The free-flowing discussion revolved around the changing face of business and the evolution of communication.

Jack Dorsey founded Twitter about three years ago and has been working to create a new way to dialogue with people all over the world that is easier to use and fold in with the current forms of communication like e-mail and SMS. Dorsey also has an answer for all the critics that claim Twitter is merely a fad.

"It may be a fad in the way people are using it today but how will they use it tomorrow?" Dorsey said.

He joked that while 99 percent of the people that find a Twitter page won't care what a person had for breakfast, one percent may really care - but they are probably that person's mother or roommate.

This small internet social space got its biggest jump in popularity when Dorsey and others closely tied to the venture went to SXSW in 2007 and spent the $10,000 they allotted for marketing on LCD screens that would display the comments of the conference attendees.

"We just became the buzz of the conference," Dorsey said.

Last month, Neilson came out with a review of Twitter that revealed that the company only had about 40 percent retention of the people that join and most leave the site within a month. Dorsey believes that many don't know what to make of this new creation and while some leave after testing it out, others return later when they see the possibilities that they hadn't known the first time around.

When one of professor Shari Weiss' students, John Paul Bobay, first tweeted Dorsey to come to the Marketing 432: Public Relations class, some thought it would be next to impossible fort them to land such a guest speaker.

"I mean who would think that he would reply to his @replies from a couple of college students. So John Paul and I synchronized our forces and would just tweet him," said James Armfield, a 24-year-old Marketing student.

One of Armfield's first tweets to Dorsey's @jack address was on April 10 and @jack replied three days later writing "I think I can do this. What day? Last week of April best."

The importance of getting Dorsey was tied to Weiss' enthusiastic focus on how Web 2.0 is changing the way PR works and encouraged students to consider joining these new communication venues.
"When I first joined Twitter, I didn't really know what to do with it. I used it like I did my status update on my Facebook account. Just kinda what I was doing or going to do. However I was able to do it via text message," said Armfield who joined in March.
"But soon I realized that I could really use it for finding news on social media, tech, just about anything I wanted. I now use for a mix of both networking and keeping in touch with friends."

Some of the students posed questions about how Twitter and other online businesses change the face of advertising and creating profits and Dorsey addressed those questions with an "only-time will tell mentality."

Twitter currently spends no money marketing or advertising their services and is creating a way to make a profit by validating the Twitter pages of politicians, companies, celebrities and others that the users would like to be verified as "genuine."

One student who heard about the appearance of Dorsey, Jane Klein, was excited to hear about what the creator thinks about the ways people use this relatively new website.

"I thought it was enlightening to hear his perspective on Twitter and how it is used in really unconventional ways," said the 19-year old undeclared undergrad. "I mean people are using it to link to their photos and find out about traffic and where to grab a drink. Who would have thought about this?"

One of the other trends that Dorsey mentioned was that Twitter has been a tool for independent businesses to draw their customers' base to where their mobile companies are going to be. Some taking advantages of these tools are farmers' markets vendors, street food vendors and even car washes.

"The most engaging aspect of the system is when you take it mobily and step away from the keyboard," said Dorsey. "I think it is a really important editorial of how the future of business will be as we get more mobile."

Dorsey personally thinks that one of the greatest things about Twitter is that "my mom loves it because she knows what I am doing and tells me what she is up to."