Invites to try Google Wave, the revolutionary real-time communication and collaboration tool, started going out around ten hours ago. If you haven’t got one yet, be patient – you might still be lucky.

Around the time Google flicked the switch on the invites, one of the team behind the launch tweeted “Wave invites starting … will take many many many many hours to get them all out! We are so very grateful for all the interest!!”

The Google Wave preview has officially been scheduled to open up to the public on September 30th according Wave API Tech Lead Douwe Osinga.

Leading up to opening up of the Google Wave preview, Osinga has outlined specific areas of improvement and new features in the official Google Wave group:

Extensions

Design good flow for adding extensions, which includes:

Developer accounts for testing Google Wave are now in circulation and the lucky blighters at Engadget have been among those trying it out. Although it’s certainly not ready for primetime yet, the revolutionary collaborative communication platform is certainly looking just as exciting as it did at the Google I/O conference in May.

What’s particularly interesting is the iPhone version of Wave. Using the HTML 5 capability of the mobile Safari browser, it allows for almost every feature of the desktop version. Back when the mobile version of Wave was revealed, realtime text display was missing as Google hadn’t worked out how to transmit all that data reliably. A solution has been developed and text now appears on the phone’s screen character-by-character as it’s typed by another user, just as it does on the desktop.