facepile

A Facepile is a way of showing interactions for a page/site by using profile pictures. It is a design element popularized by Facebook.

Description

It consists of a row or rows of profile photos of individuals who have all completed a webaction involving the current page/site. For example, who have all liked, mentioned, favorited, RSVPed, etc.

Implementation Notes

Software that displays facepiles should take care to display only one image per actor within a given facepile. For instance, someone might, using webmentions, send two likes from two discrete source URLs to a valid target URL on a website. Rather than display that person's picture twice on that URL's facepile for likes, it should determine that both webmentions came from the same author (using the authorship algorithm), and then display that person's image only once within its like-facepile.

IndieWeb Examples

Examples of IndieWeb sites using Facepiles.

Aaron Parecki

Aaron Parecki has displayed a facepile for likes and retweets since Feburary 2014.

example with >100 likes: https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2014/10/31/2/geoween
example: https://aaronparecki.com/notes/2014/10/31/2/geoween

Will Norris

Will Norris since 2014-03-09. E.g. https://willnorris.com/2014/03/display-likes-in-a-facepile

Kyle Mahan

Kyle Mahan since 2014-03-13. Screenshot:

David Shanske

David Shanske... since 2014-04-26.

Example: http://david.shanske.com/notes/2014/05/02/press/#comments

Kartik Prabhu

User:kartikprabhu.com... since 2014-??-??.

Example: http://kartikprabhu.com/article/indieweb-love-blog#reposts

Pelle Wessman

Pelle Wessman since 2014-12-30 using a new experimental embed from his WebMention service webmention.herokuapp.com.

Example on his blog: http://voxpelli.com/2014/10/indie-config-overview/
Example on webmention.herokuapp.com: https://webmention.herokuapp.com/

Sebastiaan Andeweg

Sebastiaan Andeweg uses facepiles to show likes, reposts and bookmarks for his post. For events, he also uses a facepile to show RSVPs.

Likes, reposts and bookmarks are mixed into one pile, but the text above the pile only counts the likes. When there are reposts/bookmarks but no likes, the title will say 'Reposts en bookmarks'.

RSVPs are displayed with an icon indicating 'yes', 'no', 'maybe' or 'interested'. Only the 'yes' value is in color.

Chris Aldrich

Chris Aldrich began using facepiles on his WordPress site on 2017-10-06 utilizing the new functionality of v3.5.0 of the Semantic Linkbacks plugin. Further details and images are documented here.

fluffy

fluffy uses facepiles to show reactions to entries, via webmention.js

capjamesg

capjamesg displays facepiles on his website below all posts, including articles and notes.

Silo Examples

Facebook

Twitter

As of November 2014, Twitter displays its Facepile as a count of the different types of actions, and a Facepile of the individuals who took action at all.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com (and self-hosted WordPress.org sites using JetPack) allows the display of facepiled likes within their platform.

Other Examples

USA Today

From the USA Today article: Republicans are hit the hardest as coronavirus spreads among elected leaders, using clusters and two colors to give a broad impression of a trend:

Note:

Vaguely hexagonal packing
Rows are coarse/approximate and not strictly aligned
No uniform columns
Bumpy border

Phanpy (mastodon client)

Phanpy shows likes and boosts as a facepile with like and boost icons underneath