We recently posted a 'Rate our Pivot', for Project Dirigible, our Python-based spreadsheet web-application. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2304691)

We received some great responses and excellent advice. The thing that people found the most interesting was the 'effortless cloud supercomputing' aspect, while being least engaged by the spreadsheet-UI.

So we trimmed the application to provide something more focused. The result is PythonAnywhere - a interactive Python console in the browser, that runs your code on our servers.

http://pythonanywhere.com

The user's code runs in a sandbox, to guard against griefers.

We're not tied to Python - in a later version, the server-side process could be anything, from Ruby to a Bash shell.

Casual use is free, like Dropbox, and we would charge for more resource-intensive services, maybe access to networking, or for access to substantial CPU time or disk space.

Prospective users have requested:

- Persistent sessions, so you can close your session but then pick it up from another device later on, with screen content, command-line history, and Python context intact.

- Server-side storage / Integration with Dropbox or Github or other DVCS hosts.

- Shared console sessions, so two or more users can work in the same session, maybe for tutoring, or possibly for remote pairing.

- Providing many different Python versions, all loaded with packages from PyPI, so users could try things out without any local install or config.

- Providing a grid computing API, to run users' code across several of our EC2 instances.

- An editor.

We've just gone live today with a limited private beta, in which multiple users can share persistent sessions.

We'd appreciate any feedback at all, but we're particularly interested in:

- Features that would make it useful to you.

- Features that you would pay for.

- How well we're presenting our case.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated -- thanks in advance!