If you dropped Facebook out of protest last month (which you probably didn't), and find yourself on the market for another social networking site (which you probably aren't), than you might be excited to hear Cisco is preparing to launch a new professional social networking site later in the year.

Cisco's General Manager of enterprise collaboration Murali Sitaram describes the service currently dubbed "Quad" as a place where professionals can take advantage of existing voice and video conferencing technologies offered by the company. He claims it is a "natural transition" to help fuel future technologies that will revolve around collaboration and communication.

It looks like the overall goal of the service is to marry together popular concepts like micro blogging with more immediate communication tools like live video for professional environments. For example, "if you find someone available in the network with knowledge that's useful for your project, you can start a video chat or web conference with them right away, rather than sending a message and waiting for a response".

Quad also hopes to include the ability to create personalized home pages, and host company specific content with ties into SharePoint and Documentern. Clearly Cisco is hoping this service will be adopted by firms to help replace aging intranet's that host mostly static, and outdated information.

Quad appears to be taking a unique approach, but does anyone out there think it will actually catch on?