Sharing is a basic element of socializing. Human beings have been sharing the world and all its resources since a long time. Ten years back we had no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or Foursquare but that never stopped us from sharing information with our friends and family. We took pictures, stored them in albums, sent out emails, wrote letters and spoke over the phone. For a long time, these were the only communication mediums we had for sharing. Today with the advent of technology we can share online and stay connected with friends and family all over the world on a real-time basis.Some of the online applications we use today for sharing:Facebook: Generally used to share mood, thoughts, holiday locations and photos, interesting content and chatting and socializing with friends.Twitter: A great medium for publishing content and interact with a community of followers who expect consistent contributions over time. You can use hash tags to broaden the visibility of posts and reach out to interested people.LinkedIn: Very focused to business communities and professionals and generally used to spread business ideas and discussions around various topics of business, technology, markets, research, etc.Instagram: One of the most appreciated iPhone applications which allows you to share your pictures online. The application has grown so well that a wide community of people have started to upload pictures and comment on them, creating an ecosystem of photographers, both amateur and professional.Similarly, there are many more applications and platforms available in the market for us to share our data online. In addition to helping us build connections these tools also help us to stay in touch with our friends, family members and colleagues from all over the world.Sharing business data online:When we talk about business data we start talking about spreadsheets with customer information, project details, inventory details, employee records, etc. Think about collaborating with your colleague for creating a spreadsheet for your business. The first thing you do is add some data to the sheet and email it to your colleague. Then he makes some updates and emails it back to you. This process of emailing the spreadsheet back and forth and getting the data updated becomes a very painful and time-consuming process over time. Later you would also need to sit and remove all the typographical errors and validate the data, put it all together in a format and make some meaning out of it. This painful yet widely used process becomes more complicated once other members join to collaborate with you on the spreadsheet.With the rise of Cloud Computing, a number of providers have introduced web-based applications for managing data online and thereby sharing and collaborating with team members. The data can be accessed online from anywhere and most providers give the option to access the data using any mobile device. There is Google Docs and Office 365 to help you directly move spreadsheets online and collaborate with others. Some of these services make it effortless to import from Excel into a brand-new online spreadsheet via a seamless conversion tool.What about privacy?Sharing is just the opposite of privacy. If you are comfortable with sharing your content then there is no harm in it. All these social media platforms have a level of privacy where you can restrict your profile and information from being viewed by any outside member. Similarly most other web applications used for data sharing and collaborating with your team members is done over a secured URL which prohibits a third-party to view your data.