Last week I realized something: this is a good time to be a web developer.
Why? Well, here are the reasons I have:
Social sites provide free marketing: assuming you don't wait till you have your entire product done, but have a cool idea and a coming soon page, you can get feedback for it for free in sites like facebook and twitter, thus allowing you to get a client base without even having the product done!
Developing is easier and cheaper: with free web frameworks like Django, Ruby on Rails, Grails and many others, not only creating robust, reliable and cool web applications is faster (you could release a minimum viable product in less than a month), but also cheaper: they're and compatible with free operating systems.
Information available via APIs opens a world of possibilities: Not long ago, some really cool projects couldn't see the light of day because they needed the most valuable resource ever: content. Just look at all the information that sites like twitter, freebase and delicious have and then think what could you do with it in benefit of others; and then realize that it's now possible via their free public APIs: now you can stand on the shoulders of giants, instead of cloning them and falling into oblivion. You don't need to create the next delicious or the next metaweb: you can use them as a base for a really awesome new product!
Deploying is easier, too: hosting is getting cheaper and better, solutions like linode(a VPS service), rackspacecloud are affordable, and the google app engine is free. So you could have at least a beta version of your app for as little as the ten bucks a year a .com domain costs
So, you don't have to be the only one, only the best; and now you can be the best with the least economical risk, the fastest developing cycle without compromising your revenues.
So what are you waiting for? Get up and start coding, it's never been easier and cheaper, and it wont last long!