Social networks have emerged as a dominant form of social interaction, but they continue to exhibit poor support for synchronous forms of communication. Recently we have also witnessed a rapid increase in the use of video conferencing for socialisation, evidence of the fact that body language and voice intonations are an essential part of our everyday interactions, in many instances more important than the words themselves. The two forms of communication, however, remain more or less separated from each other. The EU FP7 project Vconect hypothesizes that integrating them can create a richer form of mediated social interaction. This integration poses significant challenges with regards to service design as well as to platform implementation, the latter requiring the ability of a live video communication system to dynamically adapt to both communication contexts and network constraints thereby maximising interaction experiences and minimising the cost of operation. This presentation will report on positive results achieved by Vconect in addressing these challenges. Presented by Mr. Michael Frantzis, Goldsmiths University of London