I really wish I could use this without giving everything access to my google account. The ideas in the tech talks that describe it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bITvUUyvUAY

are too good to confine to Google's walled garden.

I'm an engineer on the Google team for coLaboratory. In order to have access to Google Drive (which we need for collaborative editing), the app needs access to your Google account.

I looking into using a weaker set of permissions, where you grant access to the app to read/write data only to files that the user opened with the App (see https://github.com/jupyter/colaboratory/pull/82). This is a much weaker set of permissions since that app cannot write to arbitrary files in Google Drive.

The port of IPython is itself open source (in the repo https://code.google.com/p/naclports/ using the build rule ipython-ppapi), so any developer is free to make their own version (e.g. as a regular web app). We are also working with the IPython/Jupyter team to upstream the collaborative features to the IPython/Jupyter notebook (in a manner that is not tied to using Google's realtime API, but could use any realtime collaboration back end).

Thank you! I'll look at trying this out, along with the Jupyter webapp.