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Molly Edmonton estimates she sends between 100 and 125 text messages a day, mostly to close friends and her 11-year-old daughter, Alexis.

"(Texting) doesn't take up as much time as making a call," she said. "It's short and to the point, and I can find out what I need to know without having to get through all the small talk of a phone conversation."

All those messages add up, and industry experts say that more text messages are sent each day in the United States than there are people who populate the country. Who's sending those messages: Moms just like Edmonton.

"Women are using the devices to manage the hectic schedules of their families," said Caran Smith, a spokeswoman for Verizon Wireless in Alabama, a national cell phone company.

It's certainly true for Edmonton, who planned a weekend trip to Atlanta via texting, sending one-sentence questions or comments to family and friends about the outing.

"When it's something simple, like questions about hotel room rates or to confirm dates, I can do that quickly," she said, adding that it's a system that allows her to make plans while at work without it interfering with the job, as a personal call might.

Surveys of text usage in the Shoals indicate that cell phone customers are sending around 20 million text messages per month, keeping pace with the rest of the state where the popularity of texting has increased by 900 percent in four years.

Nationally, the trend toward texting is equally as ubiquitous.

Shannon Nix, spokeswoman for CTIA, the official wireless association based in Washington, D.C., said the figures can be broken down even further, with nearly 690,000 texts sent per minute in the U.S.

"Given the phenomenal growth we've seen in the past few years in texting, we don't see it stopping anytime soon," she said. "As more and more people use wireless, including those who are teens and tweens, we just anticipate these numbers growing."

Tweens are defined as boys and girls between the ages of 9 and 12.

But trend forecasters say it should come as no surprise that mothers are texting more than their children.

Jim Carroll, a futurist, trends and innovations expert, said moms between 25 and 32 grew up right along with the technology that enables them to communicate via text. Edmonton, who lives in Ford City, is 31.

"It's technology that's been around for between 10 and 12 years, so they probably started texting when they were kids in nightclubs, and now they're the parents with little ones," he said.

For those who didn't grow up with it, texting might not ever catch on, Carroll said, and e-mail will remain the way to communicate electronically.

Already, text messaging, which is known in the wireless world as SMS, or short message service, has been adapted for weather and safety alerts on college campuses in the U.S. as well as a violence prevention tool in Kenya, Africa.

So much of this, Carroll contends, is a result of people such as his 12- and 14-year-old sons growing up using the technology and finding ways to apply it in the real world.

"We're seeing this come into the work force and influence the way we think, act and communicate, and you'll see that these younger users won't think a thing about sending a text to a peer in the business community or even a young doctor preferring to send a text to a patient," he said.

And just when users have the texting language down, along comes new technology, such as Twitter, a communication system that has been compared to the Web version of the telegraph. It allows users to send fast, 140-word max messages to a group of followers, who may or may not respond.

Carroll said programs such as Twitter probably don't stand a chance, however, at usurping the text message from its preferred-means-of-communications throne.

"(Twitter) has gotten a lot of hype, and it's a weird form of text messaging, but will it replace texting? No. Will it offer something different? Sure," he said.

If the texting trend persists, as all in the industry predict it will, what will the next-generation technology bring?

Carroll predicts it will be a combination of text messaging and global positioning, programs available on all of the smart cell phones being manufactured today.

"It's something that will give you the exact geographic coordinates of the person you're texting," he said. "Some people think that's cool, and some people think it's freaky. Any new technology will go through this kind of out-there phase before it becomes rational again."

Michelle Rupe Eubanks can be reached at 740-5745 or michelle.eubanks@TimesDaily.com.