Google as your competition with a product used by almost everyone is probably a little scary. And really a bunch of people have tried it and have yet to find a way to make money.
Upvoted but I do not like this idea of "do not go against Google". Zoho did not stop and they are a profitable company without outside funding. All their products compete with Google products. Twitter could have hung up when Google bought Jaiku. Omnisio does not allow new sign ups, and yet there are several people who can use the service. Gmail Chat is beautiful, but Meebo is still doing well. Friend Connect is out there, but Facebook Connect got 1.5M updates on Inauguration day. Android appstore has 800 apps, and the near future is not looking good. And so on...
EDIT:I say pick one field where Google sucks and improve it, make it better. One thing is for sure, you will have less competition by going against Google then by going against Twitter or FriendFeed or HN...
Yes; but, this is different. Your not competing with Google on something they think could make a ton of money. Its not something that Google is missing out on features. The problem is stability. Google has its own data centres and has many experts on this.
I agree. I would imagine this is an idea that is nearly impossible to turn a dime with.
What are your options really? Either charge a monthly fee for a service that your users can find for free elsewhere (either right now, or eventually) or you can slide in ads between the feeds you serve that no one is going to bother to click on anyway.
The big appeal of FeedBurner for most people is their subscriber count monitoring and, unfortunately for them, it's something they don't do a very good job of tracking to begin with.
The other big unspoken aspect of FeedBurner is that those very counts are so easy to manipulate that trusting anyone's numbers is too big of a leap of faith anyway. The whole system is about bunk now.
