Puricute is the new site on the block offering cute picture frames for all to see. The site is very well designed and neat. It should be able capture the young female, or more specifically, capture the asian audiences very quickly. 

Puricute provides users with a very simple interface to create their picture frame. First you upload your photo and choose the various stamps and frames to add. You can insert animals and cute cakes into your picture, then send them out to friends or blog. The site also hosts a gallery where you can view other puricute photos created by others.

How cute is too cute?

Puricute unfortunately doesn’t stand itself apart from other glitter sites. There isn’t any robust features that can make it compete with blingee. You can only undo stamps in the order that you add them. We would like to see it where you can delete a stamp by clicking on it. Also you can’t insert your own user created stamps. This seriosuly puts it behind other glitter apps.

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Pazoen is yet another site glitter site, trying to take over the throne of Blingee. It’s main focus is to add glitter stamps and text to your photos. Pazoen doesn’t really add anything new and interesting to the multitude of glitter sites out there. The generic interface has the usual tools of adding graphics, resizing stamps, and adding text. Typing glitter text was its most robust feature and was pretty easy to do.

 

Similar to Blingee, it has a badge feature that allows you to add graphics from other sites into your bag. With your bag you can paste these stamps into the photos you are editing. However, uploading a custom stamp was not working at the time of this review and only leads to a blank page. At the embed screen you will get a very clean embed code, which we recommend that all image hosting sites abide to. There is also a flash version of your picture which doesn’t really add to the quality of the image compared to the gif version.

There are many bugs lurking around the site, some might be frustrating towards new visitors. If you finish your picture and click "Start over with the same graphic", your subsequent end result isn’t saved. For some reason only the previously saved work appears, it seems that you’ll have to re-upload the same picture again to make this bug go away. Another pet peeve is the missing delete button. If you want to remove a stamp, you’ll have to keep pressing "undo" it until its gone. If you added a lot of glitter and want to remove something you did at the beginning, you’d have to move the stamp off the screen. We also noticed that the animation of the stamps were much slower when you completed the image. So far Pazoen feels a bit unfinished and has a long way to go before it can be at the top of its game. If other glitter sites are too hard for you or you just want an alternative, try Pazoen out for a change.

 

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Blingee may be just another site like pikipimp, but its far far easier to use. Blingee’s website is clear from obnoxious ads and crazy pop-ups and gives you the tools to create your trendy blingin masterpiece. One of its notable features is the Fill Area tool. You can instantly add your own background below your photo. Although it works better if you have taken your photo against a white wall. Blingee also allows you to add graphics from other glitter sites like myspaceglitter, in a feature called "Stamps" You can upload any photo and it will shared for other users to create their own images. Adding bling to a picture is as easy as clicking certain spots of where you want it to go. Rotating is done much much better than pikipimp, as it doesn’t squash or stretch it. Of course with using glitter graphic sites, the main drawback is your photos will have poor quality due to Gif Standards. We’d like to see if a site like this could make use of flash and keep pictures high quality with all their bling.

 

After you have finished creating your picture you must then register, it will then provide you the code needed to direct link to the image. Now Blingee gets a bit ridiculous in advertising considering it adds a black logo on each image. So here’s how we can remove Build Your Own blingee, while keeping the link back to the site. We’re nice people OK :) but don’t push us Blingee.

  

Removing Unnecessary Build your own Blingee Advertisement. Look at the Code Below

<a href="http://blingee.com/blingee/view/17523460-webappsreview" alt="Build your own Blingee" target="_blank">
<img alt="webappsreview" border="0" height="160"
src="http://image.blingee.com/images12/content/output/2007/7/22/67392172_e25eba33.gif"
title="webappsreview" width="106" /></a><br /><a href="http://blingee.com" target="_blank">
<font size="2">Build your own Blingee</font></a><br /><br />

The example above shows a complete code you should put on your myspace. To make this cleaner remove everything you see above thats highlighted in green. Of course your not supposed to use MY code, but you should look at your own code for your own picture and remove what I highlighted. When your done the resulting code will look similar to the one below

<a href="http://blingee.com/blingee/view/17523460-webappsreview" alt="Build your own Blingee" target="_blank">
<img alt="webappsreview" border="0" height="160"
src="http://image.blingee.com/images12/content/output/2007/7/22/67392172_e25eba33.gif"
title="webappsreview" width="106" /></a><br />

Now your done! Enjoy making blingin pictures!

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Image sites like pikipimp lets you dress your photographs and add any "cool" glitter style graphics on top of it. Its clear they are attracting the Myspace crowd with their blingy text and animations. The user gallery shows pretty much the main audience of the site. Its scary seeing how many teens add cigarettes to their photos, but we’ll just focus on the app itself. First you upload an image. Then click and drag any elements on the side such as hats, chest hair, bikinis, headphones, glasses, and even scars. The app is nice enough to include rotation and effects for power users. I’m not too fond with its rotation engine. Instead of a full rotation, the element gets squashed within its "box" causing it to become disproportioned. Because of this, you’ll have to manipulate the box’s size to get back the aspect ratio you want. Clicking effects opens up a toolbar filled with all sorts of goodies. You can change the saturation, and color, or even motion blur on the fly. Each effect loads pretty fast and thats good for the savy hungry beast of Myspace users.

After you have finished amd saved your image, pikipimp adds a bar at the bottom advertising back to the site. I don’t like this at all and would rather pikipimp just use the link back to the site just as they do in their embed code. Its not so hard to photoshop the bar out of the picture but I guess the average myspace  user won’t know how to do it. Another gripe I have is that whenever you add animations, the image is set to gif and greatly reduces the quality of your picture. I know its something they can’t avoid given the limitations of .gif colors. However, I think in the future it would be nice for them to create an embeddable flash widget that hosts the image.

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