October 16, 2005 2:34 PM

GreatestJournal is not the greatest journal

Yesterday, I discovered GreatestJournal (GJ). It's a clone of LiveJournal (LJ) -- it uses LiveJournal's Open Source code -- but it's totally free. There is no way to obtain a paid account. GJ gives you all of LJ's paid features for free. Instead, they put targeted Google ads on your user info page (not on the actual blog) which is out of the way and acceptable to me. Sounds great, right?

Upon closer inspection, I discovered that their terms of service and rules for posting are much stricter than LJ's. There's no freedom of expression. They even have a rule that explicitly states that images of people cannot have more than 75% of their skin showing. Photo Gallery users cannot upload digitally manipulated images (i.e. text added to a photograph) or videos (movie clips pieced together from different frames.)

Seriously. I kid you not.

While I would not recommend Greatest Journal for mature or sophisticated users, I do recommend it for children (under the age of 18) because there are protective measures in place to guard against immaturity and general stupidity. Plus, the price tag won't set you back a week on your allowance.