Social Networking Sites (SNS) have become increasingly popular with the rise of the Web 2.0 in which internet users are invited to contribute and interact on web sites. Although many SNS are criticized for privacy issues, most of their users tend to share more and more personal (and sometimes intimate) content on these communities. This creates new opportunities for them to communicate and exchange with their friends, acquaintances or even with people they are ready to interact with. In this

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... er, we explore how to gather and leverage user's context knowledge in order to ease and enhance the social communication experience in networking sites. In order to give a first illustration of our proposition, we also present our current works on hyperlocal communications as a transposition of the SNS paradigm to real life meetings and encounters. We rely on an analysis of several modern SNS and their new usages, a definition of context-awareness, and the current trends that motivate our approach.