It may be petty on my part, but I wish FeedBurner would tell us how they’re going to make money. Recent events have made it clear that free services can disappear at any time. I love the FeedBurner concept, but I hate to outsource my feed url. How would I get my readers back if FeedBurner went under?

It seems to me that there is an opportunity for someone to offer URL Escrow. In the event of a domain name holder going under, the escrow company would assume temporary control of the domain name and provide redirect service for a limited time. Control of the domain would revert to the owner once the redirect service expired. The target market would be hosted services using the host domain - Feedburner, TypePad and Radio Userland users w/o their own domains, …

I envision pricing along the lines of a fixed upfront fee to put a domain into escrow and a modest periodic fee per registered url. It doesn’t take much to provide a redirect service. The hard part is being perceived as a viable business so that users will trust that you’ll still be around when they need you.