I'm on a GoogleFight kick, since watching terms slug it out in Flash feels like you're doing research, sort of, but hey, fun. But the question actually came first, which was this: when did invite (1,580,000) start becoming a serious contender for invitation (15,400,000)? Such as I'll send you an invite, a sentence I might hear several times a day.[1]
It's clearly not a new phenomenon, since most dictionaries list it as a noun, "informal." I suppose my real question is whether people who use an invite regularly also use an invitation in more formal contexts or whether it's more dialectical -- you use one or the other more-or-less exclusively. (I'll send you a wedding invite.)
[1] Mind you, no one's inviting me, and certainly not if I persist in asking "Did you just say an invite?"
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FWIW, an INVITE is a type of message in SIP, the leading signaling language for Voice over IP (voip).
I wouldn't worry that people are substituting invite for invitation in casual speak. I'd weigh how much chatter there is on the Internet about a VoIP protocol (that has been developed, debated, and discussed i Internet communities) against how much non-computer sciency chatter about invitations is on the Internet.
To be clear, I don't worry about it, I'm just interested in when the phenomenon started occuring. For all I know, it's been there all along (the "recency illusion" -- http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002386.html)
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