Back in the 90's, I did some work for the Ontario Telepresence Project. We did lots of studies on videoconferencing, shared mediaspaces...
What strikes me given the relative lack of outcome of the project, compared to the ubiquity of today's camera phones, is that the Telepresence project had it wrong when it wanted to have people *face* each other during conversations.
It turns out, this is not what we want. Staring at your interlocutor's face is not what you do in a usual conversation, it's even embarassing. You look at a shared point of interest. Turning the camera the opposite side of the screen was the way to go. First, you could use the cell phone as a camera, and second, in a phone conversation, it's much more useful to say "look at this", than to offer a nice view of you're hairy nose.
Or, to put it like St. Exupery:
Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction...