Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World Highlight

The company’s real growth coup came when it scraped users’ contact lists and spammed them with invites. We will catch up with Zuckerberg and Facebook later, but it’s important to put the project in the context of web scraping, the relatively simple set of tricks that let one well-placed coder reach through the keyboard and touch the whole world. What happened then depended a lot on what the coder (or small team) had to offer the powers that be.