If you're not one of the 100,000 lucky users who gets an invitation to Google Wave today, don't fret. You can check out Google Wave right here.
But first, ground rules. Click on all images in this post to see it full size. Uppercase "Wave" refers to the entire Google Wave product. Lowercase "wave" refers to an individual message or document. Think of a lowercase wave like an email or a Google Doc that you're collaborating on with other people. The screenshots in this post are from the Wave developer preview, not wave.google.com, invites to which are going out today. We'll update this post with anything significantly new in the non-preview version when we get our grubby little paws on the proper server invitation.
Ready? Let's go.
Inside Google Wave
When you log into Wave, the default view is a three-column, 4-module layout. From left to right, the first column includes Navigation on top (think of this as your Inbox, Sent, and labels in Gmail) and Contacts below (think of this as your GTalk buddy list). The second column is the list of active waves in your In