Well, I got my Google Wave invite. It’s slick, easy to use, and I’m imagining ways it could turn out to be useful. But the trouble is, it’s a collaborative tool, and right now there are a grand total of four contacts in my address book who are also on Google Wave, and I’m not collaborating with any of them on anything right now. I started a test wave, just to see how it worked, and invited two of them (one of whom was the source of my invite) to participate.

In case you’ve missed out on this, Google Wave is — hard to describe. It’s sort of a cross between an instant messenger program and one of those online document services (like Google Docs or Buzzword) that lets people collaborate on the same document. A “wave” is a free-form message-slash-document, and anyone who is invited to participate in it can modify it, reply to it, embed things in it, and what have you.

There will also be extensions or plugins to the basic service that add functionality. For example, there’s a sudoku plugin that lets you start a Sudoku game with someone else online in the form of a wave. There’s a “yes/no/maybe” polling plugin, and so on.

I think this service will, like Twitter, turn out to be used in ways the creators never imagined. It’s flexible, responsive and easy to use.

Right now, though, I really don’t have much of an opportunity to try it out. Eventually, I assume I will get some invitations to the beta test, and I can start inviting other people to participate. Also, as time goes on, I’m sure I’ll find more of my friends popping up online after having received their invites from other sources.