One possible technological solution to the "telepresent people have trouble finding and participating in regular conversations, (which may actually be doable today, although it would require quite a bit of preparation and expense) is a robot controllable over the internet. (I.e. something vaguely Roomba/ RD-D2 shaped, with a laptop/camera sitting on top of it, piloted via some internet website)

This would have the added benefit of "Robots are cool", which means people would be more likely, not less, to communicate with whoever's displayed on the robot's laptop.

Building a robot is also a pretty cool thing to do, even if it turns out that using it for telepresence still isn't very effective.