Not so long ago, the showing of holiday photos and ciné films to family, friends, workmates and neighbours was a suburban ritual so horrific it was staple material of the stand-up comic. Yet, somehow, in just a few years we’ve come from this to a state of affairs where sharing photos is a cool and youthful thing to do rather than an activity for dull men wearing slippers, smoking a pipe and controlling a projector.

I’ve long been suspicious of all forms of modern digital sharing. I am as egotistical as the next journalist but something – maybe age, or British reticence, or embarrassment – has held me back from even having a personal website. Just couldn’t do it. Maybe it’s a fear of rejection – what if nobody wanted to look at it? Then came Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, and suddenly it was possible to have the benefits of a website without going the whole, egomaniacal hog and actually dedicating a ‘place’ to the greater glory of yourself.

So I became a semi-Facebooker and very occasionally would put up a thought I found amusing, or a web link to something I cared about. I can’t say I’ve got much out of my Facebook sharing life. My circle of 100 or so ‘friends’ ranges from a boy I was at primary school with in the 1960s to a woman I spoke to for half an hour in a bar in Stockholm last summer. It’s far from a comprehensive list of my real pals. Put it another way, I shan’t be expecting a massive turnout at my funeral from my Facebook ‘friends’.

But, even for a sharing sceptic, the urge to share a little grows the more the culture is embraced. The other day, I was on the 431km/h Maglev train between Shanghai and the city’s international airport 34km and six minutes away in Pudong. It’s a journey that I’ve probably done 50 times over the past four years, but it was only this time, on the 51st trip, that I thought to video it. And, after having done so for no obvious reason, only then did I have the notion of uploading it to Facebook to await the applause from my ‘friends’.

Well, at the time of writing, the video has been up a day and has been viewed and given the ‘I Like’ thumbs-up icon by two people – the boy from primary school and the woman from the Stockholm bar.

It’s acclaim of a kind, I suppose, but I sort of get it now, I think. I’m no longer totally against the idea of the occasional share. However, just as I’ve made the relevant, cultural, mid-course correction, the sharing world is about to ramp up a level thanks to a new software app from a Swedish company, Bambuser.

Bambuser offers to ability to stream video live from your phone to social networking sites – or your own website. So in the case of my Maglev trip in China, I could have emailed friends who were by their computer or phone, told them I was about to send an amazing stream of video live from the train and broadcast as it happened, with little or no delay.

Bambuser clearly offers great potential for news coverage; local TV stations in Finland are already equipping reporters’ phones with Bambuser. In major world disasters and political situations, like 9/11 or the troubles in Iran last summer, it would clearly be a worthwhile thing.

But for every one of us to become a live, broadcasting video reporter? Surely that is an egomania to far. Or will I, a couple of years down the line, be Bambus-ing down with the kids? Unlikely as it may currently seem, I – and you – probably will.