From street level in Palo Alto, California, the headquarters of Bill Nguyen’s new startup appears to be an abandoned storefront: A sign on the door instructs you go to elsewhere, and the windows are covered with brown butcher paper.

But those permitted to enter find a bustling high-tech operation. Dozens of energetic young people work on long tables loaded with computer equipment. It’s like a black and white photo exploding into vibrant color, reminiscent of the scene in The Sting where a nondescript door leads to a busy and luxurious gambling joint.

The stealth ends. Nguyen, a fabled serial entrepreneur whose last company was the cloud-based music service Lala (bought by Apple), is launching Color, a photo-based social networking mobile app. It’s available in the Apple app store tonight.

Like another recently announced social app called Path, Color ties people together by the camera lens of a smartphone. But in other respects, Color couldn’t be more different.

Whereas Path limits distribution of your visual “moments” to those in your social cohort — following the theories of Robin Dunbar, who postulates that people have meaningful connections to a relatively small group of associates — Color augments your experience by unlocking the newly captured memories of the people sharing your physical space.  It’s the anti-Dunbar app, welcoming people into your circle, even if you don’t know them and don’t intend to.

This puts it squarely into a problem space that many sharp minds in tech are trying to solve: How can you create instant local communities among those who occupy the same place at the same time? Solving the problem not only makes for a compelling experience that alters human interaction, but offers a huge revenue opportunity by being able to sell to everyone at a given spot, at just the right time.

Here’s how Color works: Once the app is installed on your iPhone or Android phone (it’s available on both, free, beginning March 24; eventually it will find its way to Blackberry and Win 7 phones), you simply open it and thus are provided entry into a transient cohort of everyone else in the area snapping pics via Color. Color calls this a “multilens” experience. Anyone in that group who takes a photo or a video instantly shares those images with everyone else.

And once you take a picture yourself, you can take those shots with you. In the most mundane aspect, picture a birthday party where a half-dozen people take photos or grab some video. Instead of passing the camera around — look at this one! — or sharing files the next day on Facebook or even sending them in a complicated e-mail circle, everyone has access all at once.

There are some truly fascinating aspects of Color. The first is that your personal photo log will be transformed into a collective work created by all of those who shared a space with you. What’s more, once a photo taken by another Color user is included in the massive “personal diary” you will accumulate, you can get a glimpse of their lives — actually viewing the photo stream of the moments they have captured.

That’s right, you can see their personal diaries. If some unknown dude snapped a picture of a performer at a concert you attended, two years later you can click on it and instantly get access to his wedding pictures and his obsessive documentation of barbecue joints.

But it isn’t a exercise in pure voyeurism: Those whose diaries you view will get a notification that you’re perusing their stream. And then they might be inclined to look over your diary. Color sees this all as a public service, with Kumbaya-like effects of people getting to know each other.

Being able to glimpse into the lives of the strangers around you, and vice versa, pulls back a social curtain with consequences that remain to be seen. This may become of the most effective social icebreakers of all time. Or just creepy.

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