Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Very surprising, especially for a long established ‘professional’ network. Have they completely turned their backs on the intranet, or was it a typo in the original spec docs? I’ve only ever been contacted by life coaches or the undefineable! Good exposure Paul. Would love to read the internal comms relating to pyramid plans.

Shocking? Maybe. Surprising? Not at all.

I’m one of the few people that manages to gain clients and exposure from Ecademy, but have no doubts that nothing regarding the unprofessionalism of the management team surprises me.

Let’s not forget that the owner of Ecademy retweets his private D Twitter messages automatically….

I’ll be interested to see the public response to this.

I see the access has been removed now:

http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=support&sid=1

It looks as if it’s been switched off now. http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=support&sid=1

I have been reading about this in a variety of places and I was shocked that it happened. I have been a member of Ecademy for 14 months, and yes it has it’s flaws but it’s not the only social network for professionals and SME business owners. It saddens me that it takes a post like this to correct an error, but no apology is forthcoming to the members. Like most things in life, you get what you pay for.

That is scary to even think about.. I wonder how many other social networks have such vulnerabilities..

I wonder how publicly Ecademy’s going to own up to this, and how pro-actively they’re going to manage their response to the community?? Will be logging onto it tonight, to take a look, and possibly start planning my exit from that platform, now that I’ve heard this..

Can’t say I’m surprise though, it always did seem a little more complicated than it needed to be.. And if it’s ever too complicated, chances are you’ll probably miss some flaw, some hole somewhere - but something that public? That’s just wrong!

I’m sure some people benefit from ecademy, but I’ll be surprised if the numbers are in double figures

I personally think gone are the days that social networks (technical or people based) can continue to make money out of purely connecting people. At least not tech-savvy people anyway. Life coaches will always look for weird ways to connect to people…

I don’t know any senior industry people who have any respect for this network. That’s not a personal attack on any member of the team by the way. I don’t know them.

[...] appear to have now plugged the hole, but not before blogger Paul Walsh captured an interesting exchange: [...]

Paul, you’ve done it now.
Mr. Power is surely getting his Paul Walsh voodo doll out…

Makes me surely a winner being picked out of tens of thousands of email conversations.

Re. the backdoor . . . I’ve always said that no thing ever on the internet is private. Thanks for highlighting this and giving ecademy the opportunity to fix that bug, Paul

And adding to my marketing

[...] ecademy makes tens of thousands of email conversations available online - Paul Walsh, the Irish Oppo…. [...]

I agree with Nikki Pilkington (above) Shocking, but not Surprising.

Ecademy was/is doing well technical, as the SEO value can be good, but over the last six months or so, the value within Ecademy has declined.

The attitude of the Ecademy “team” to complaints has been eye opening at times, whitewashing, when the cracks should have been mended first.

I have yet to see a reason to become a paid member … unless I wanted to make a few ££ on commissions for bringing in more paid members (sound familiar?)

I also agree with your comment Paul, “gone are the days that social networks (technical or people based) can continue to make money out of purely connecting people.” …. they have to add value.

http://www.Cagora.com is doing something more interesting from a social network point of view and it shows promise, but we’ll have to wait until it starts attracting more members.

I think that change is coming very soon … bumpzee.com has taken a sabbatical … pownce.com closed just two days ago and I think that we will see many more social networks close in 2009.

On a daily basis, I get far more from the 140 characters in Twitter than any other social network I log in to.

I’d pay for an “advertising free” Twitter account.

Paul, I couldn’t agree more with you about Ecademy - why on earth do I want to be contacted by mind-guru’s in Switzerland to join their network. If I were the co-founders, I would be looking to get out of this business a.s.a.p. as I just can’t see what it’s USP is. The only good thing about it is the quality networking sites that have sprung up around it who have used Ecademy as a template on what not to do when creating a social networking site !!

Getting lost in social networks like Ecademy….would i suggest waste a lot of your time…

Amazingly I have so many people writing to me, who are fed up with Ecademy spam….

Why - Ecademy is all about advertising and I guess MLM…

I can think of a lot better ways to use your time, can’t you?

Err…. these emails are still visible

http://www.ecademy.com/node.php?id=21563

still visible wat do u say sire..

Ecademy is one big MLM/Pyramid scheme - they encourage small business people to think they will make a fortune selling on Ecademy if they spend ages on the network, blogging like crazy (so Ecademy gets the SEO effect) and recruiting new paid members (where they get a few pennies).

99% of members leave after a short period fed up with constant spam, cheezy communications, pressure selling of the latest NLP Guru, and the, shall we say, frank discussions with existing members.

Ecademy’s have been desperately trying to flog the network to anyone who will listen for the last four years as they know it will collapse like a Bernard Madoff scheme. There have been no takers - funny that