Sliced Bread.

Nothing like breaking bread to bring people together, and who hasn't had a cheese sandwich with a friend? So along with the wheel, the steam engine, plastic, the phone and the PC, sliced bread makes my list of great inventions. The problem with some of them, like the steam engine, which kick started the industrial revolution, is they decimated villages and turned everything into cities of isolated individuals. The sharing and caring village environment became a thing of the past as accumulation of wealth and objects took hold to splinter communities.

Where am I going with my ramblings? I'd like to add something new to the above list bringing back the village life, web aggregation. We may not live in grass huts any more but online we have found new ways to connect and share and sometimes care. Aggregation sites from the largest social connectors, all the way through to niche players with small tribes attached are having a village effect on our daily lives.

Whereas business has long figured out ways to make buying easy via aggregation, think expedia, think eBay, sharing and caring are only just coming into their own, usually on a local level to start with and often with just enough economy to keep things moving. What used to be a village sharing for the benefit of all, what used to be co ops optimising local products or labour and what used to be the neighborly thing to do, share a cup of sugar, has spawned a web explosion of sharing. Sharing cars, clothes, tools, couches, meals, homes and property, is bringing back the village feeling, missing since the first steel mill turned us inwards.

Today sites cater to that long forgotten sharing gene enabling people to share assets and extract value from stuff they already have but don't necessarily use everyday. Last year over 3 million people from 235 countries couch surfed, while millions shared bikes, others set up micro lending schemes and not for profit car sharing business, all the while not having to produce or buy another product to make it happen.

Rachel Botsman, who coauthored What's Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, tenders thinking that ownership is going full circle and maybe we had it right a hundred years ago. Add to this, many Millennials not physically owning a lot of stuff like music, images, books and even social relationships, the potential for sharing on the web has opportunity to increase and bring back the good feelings when people shared and cared.

The biggest hurdle the free and altruistic sharing and caring sites have, is the opportunity to make a dollar out of asset sharing. Sites such as, Parkatmyhouse, Zipcar, Airbnb and Sharespark, take über consumption to another level and have taken the unused asset model and applied monetary rules for profit. If the dollar can be kept at arm's length, then the slow process of bringing back the helping gene has a chance because the web is big enough for everyone, big business and those wanting to share their good fortune.

Think about what you could do to bring people together? Time to break bread, online.