According to a recent announcement made by Neighborhood social networking startup Yatown, Jerome Park, a veteran software engineer who hails from Netscape and Google (News - Alert), will now be heading its engineering efforts. An experienced engineering leader, Park is expected to “accelerate product development efforts.”

“Engineering prowess aside, what separated Jerome out was that he spent the last four, five years in the startup trenches,” said Christopher Nguyen, Yatown’s CEO, in a statement. “His combination of large, world-class software companies and entrepreneurial experience is going to be extremely valuable to an engineering-driven startup like Yatown.” Nguyen added, “We’re very lucky to have Jerome on board. We can now shift the whole team into gear!”

During his days with Google, Park built and led the Enterprise Search Appliance partner team. At Netscape, he worked on some of the core engines of the Netscape’s infrastructure server suite.

In a statement Park said he is “extremely excited to be getting back to helping to build a large platform company from its infancy.” He adds that “I believe Yatown is well positioned to become the leading geo-social platform provider, building on its focus on social connections among neighbors. It’s really exciting times to be in this space. Here I am, signing on the dotted line on the day my former employer is announcing a huge launch of Google+.”

Commenting on Google+’s effects on Yatown, Park said, “I think it’s a hugely positive development! Yatown intends to dominate the neighborhood social context, and Google+ is very likely going to be an open infrastructure partner to us, much like Facebook (News - Alert) is. Diversity and choice here are good for our users, and for us!” He added, “For example, I can see the Yatown using the Google+ Circles feature as an API to manage the ‘Neighbors’ Circle”. Yatown CEO Nguyen said, “Our value-add is to provide a Trusted Neighborhood context for users to interact with neighborhood news, events, deals, and of course other neighbors, in a simple, consistent way they can’t easily find organized elsewhere. As such, having more partners to help with identity management and user distribution makes our job that much easier!”

Rahul Arora is a TMCnet contributor. He has worked as an editor and freelance writer for several reputed organizations in India. To read more of his articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Rich Steeves