Yatown, a hyper-local social network that launched earlier this month that brings communities closer together, has announced that the former Senior VP of Yahoo’s Global Search, Tuoc Luong, has joined their board and invested in the startup.

Luong is a great addition to the company and a veteran of the industry. In addition to his role at Yahoo, Luong worked with Zazzle as their CTO and Ask.com as well as held senior executive positions at Microsoft and Borland. Currently he’s the CEO of Shanda Online and Head of the Shanda Innovation Institute in America.

Yatown CEO, Christopher Nguyen spoke on Luong’s addition to the company:

Tuoc Luong is a well respected figure in our industry with a sterling track record. We’re extremely excited by Tuoc’s participation, and look forward to drawing a lot of value from his scope of experience as we build out the Trusted Neighborhood Network.

Luong’s interest in the company sparked because he was impressed by Yatown’s initiative to be a social network focused on particular neighborhoods rather than the general population like networks such as Facebook and Twitter. “Yatown is providing a valuable solution for local neighborhood communities. This site will reconnect neighbors in communities, just as water coolers bring people together in offices,” he says.

For a startup, Yatown is certainly not lacking in industry experience. Both of the founders, Christopher Nguyen and Kevin Lim, are former Google employees. Luong will add even more experience to Yatown which is currently still in Beta and open to 192,000 neighborhoods across the U.S.