Hey everyone, author of the original essay here. Glad to see so much interest in Nostr!

I originally published this article in Jan '23. Since then, we've seen a lot of development around both the protocol and applications (much of which has been well documented here by jb55 and others). Twitter-like clients such as Damus and Amethyst have gotten much better and new clients like primal (primal.net) have emerged with their own takes on features like caching and algorithms. Nostr Wallet Connect made it substantially easier to connect a Lightning wallet with a Nostr client for one tap zapping, radically simplifying the payment experience for end users.

I'm personally most excited to see several early examples of applications that move beyond social media and show Nostr for what it is - a generalized data protocol. Almost any app would benefit from a persistent identity and portable data shared with other apps. Here are a few live examples:

- Long tail of edge AI services - pablof7z and several others are piloting a new construct called "data vending machines (DVMs)" which allow users to publish job requests to the nostr network and other users (or bots) to compete to fulfill those requests. We're already seeing early markets for fine tuned open source models completing services like voice-to-text transcription or image generation. Even cooler, each of these DVMs is chainable, so the output of one DVM can be the input of another. See https://vendata.io for example. This recent hackathon had a few cool dvm projects as well: https://bolt.fun/tournaments/ai4all/overview

- Music - Stemstr (stemstr.app) is a Nostr native app for creating and remixing music. Wavlake (wavlake.com) is a music streaming service with Lightning zaps, which recently integrated Nostr login.

- Text annotation - https://highlighter.com allows users to collaboratively highlight text (think rapgenius on Nostr). You can even collaboratively highlight this very thread if you like!

- Marketplaces - bids and asks are messages which can be published over Nostr, allowing multiple marketplace front ends to share a common order book or liquidity. We've already seen a few pocs for building Nostr based marketplaces such as: github.com/lnbits/nostrmarket github.com/supertestnet/superstore

- Nostr browser - an early version of Spring, a nostr browser, recently launched to experiment with hosting various microapps in one interface: github.com/nostrband/nostr-universe/

This list is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully it gives a good overview of Nostr's potential. I've invested in a number of these projects already and remain committed to funding many more hackers exploring Nostr in the coming months!