score one for synergy

It takes the number of characters in this paragraph — just 160 — to flirt, avoid traffic jams, balance your checking accounts, help Africa and win a generation. Text messaging on cell phones is finally taking off in the United States. It has been around for years and is a huge part of life in Japan and South Korea. But in the U.S. market, text messaging had caught on only among teens and “American Idol” fans voting for their favorites — until the past year or so.

Now this seemingly bare-bones medium — a message limited to 160 text characters transmitted to a cell phone screen for a few cents — is a raging phenomenon.

“It’s clearly exploding,” says Sky Dayton, co-founder of EarthLink who is now running a U.S. joint venture, SK-EarthLink, with South Korea’s biggest cellular operator. “It’s an example of how a medium evolves into something you never expected it to.”

About 5 billion text messages are sent a month in the U.S., up from 2.8 billion a year ago, according to the wireless trade association CTIA. But the real story is in the inventive ways this medium is penetrating everyday life.

Live 8, the global series of rock concerts July 2, generated 26 million text messages worldwide in support of debt relief for African nations. At U2 concerts this summer, fans can text their names to show up on a giant screen behind the band.

Sports teams are starting to use “texting” to bond with fans. Hair salons can use it to remind customers of appointments. You can sign up to get text updates about traffic on your commuting route and weather in your hometown. Teen People magazine will automatically text you breaking news about such weighty issues as Scarlett Johansson’s love life. At www.sms.ac, which wants to be the Yahoo! of text messaging, guys can sign up to get a new pickup line every day (SMS stands for “short messaging service,” another term for text messaging).

Much more is coming as marketers wake up to the possibilities. “We’re starting to see major brands utilize text messaging,” says Alex Campbell, CEO of Vibes Media, which has helped McDonald’s, Budweiser and the Chicago White Sox with text-messaging campaigns.

A number of factors are finally converging into a perfect text-messaging storm in the U.S.

For starters, there’s the sheer mass of text-capable phones out there: Of 192 million active mobile phones in the U.S., 90 percent have screens and can handle text messages, CTIA says.

All of those phones, however, awaited a key that would unlock a texting boom: interoperability.

Unlike in other parts of the world, the U.S. cell phone market has multiple carriers using different, incompatible wireless networks. Just a couple of years ago, a text message sent from, say, a Verizon phone often couldn’t get to a Cingular phone. The only way texting would take off was if it could be more like e-mail, reaching any device over any network.

Enter Mobile 365, the nation’s biggest cross-network mobile-messaging-delivery service, along with some of its smaller competitors. Their services take in text messages sent from one network and transfer it into another, so any message can reach any phone. Now, about 45 percent of text-messaging traffic flows between previously incompatible networks.

In the meantime, many Americans have grown accustomed to typing on tiny keys using their thumbs.

Speeding the process is a character-saving body of accepted texting shorthand: BRB means “be right back.” TTYL is “talk to you later.” (For a whole dictionary, check out www.txt2flrt.com/content/lingo.aspx.)

Cultural factors play a role in text messaging’s surge. Teenagers have made it a routine way to communicate. About 63 percent of Americans ages 18 to 27 text message, according to a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey out in March. Those teens are bringing texting to their parents — or are moving into the work force and texting with older colleagues. Now 31 percent of cell phone owners ages 28 to 39 use text, and 18 percent of those 40 to 49 do, Pew reports.