ClaimID

» see claimid.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

ClaimID gave you one page at claimid.com/yourname that listed everything of yours on the web, and let you mark each link with whether you had written it or whether it was merely about you. That second distinction was the product. In 2006 a search for your own name returned a pile of material with no way to say which parts you stood behind, and the two people building this were information science PhD students at UNC Chapel Hill, Terrell Russell and Fred Stutzman, which is exactly the department that would treat that as a solvable problem.

The same page was also an OpenID. You logged in elsewhere by typing your ClaimID address, the site bounced you back for a password, and you were authenticated without having made another account. That was the deal OpenID offered the whole web between roughly 2006 and 2010, and ClaimID was one of the handful of providers people actually used, alongside myOpenID and LiveJournal.

The domain was registered on 29 September 2005 and the first archived capture, on 20 May 2006, is an invite request form with a login for beta users. Nobody recorded a launch date at the time. The service ended up supplying one itself, in its own goodbye note, seven and a half years later.

~ the record ~

~ the pitch ~

Identity management as a consumer product only makes sense in a specific window. Before it, there was not enough about you online to sort. After it, Facebook and LinkedIn had taken the job, and what people wanted was not a verified index of their links but a profile with a photo on it. ClaimID sat in the middle of that window with a tool for people who had a scattered footprint and cared about the difference between authorship and mention: academics, plus anybody carrying a common name.

Turkey never saw this layer at all. Sites here ran their own logins, and when third-party login finally arrived it arrived as a Facebook button, so the whole decentralized identity argument passed over without anybody local having to pick a side. The examples printed under ClaimID's own login box give the era away: one address at myOpenID, one at LiveJournal.

~ the winter the providers closed ~

By October 2013 you could no longer create an OpenID through ClaimID, a feature that had quietly stopped working. The last live capture of the front page is 4 December 2013, and in its HTML the "Create a new account" link is commented out rather than removed. Six days later the site was a tombstone. The same season took the biggest provider too: Janrain announced on 4 September 2013 that myOpenID would be switched off on 1 February 2014, and Mozilla's Persona was already on its way to the same end.

~ the tombstone ~

The first version of the notice, up by 10 December 2013, was vague: "After many years of service, ClaimID has ceased operations." Somebody had built it from Bootstrap's Narrow Jumbotron example and never deleted the demo content, so under the farewell sat four headings reading "Subheading" and four paragraphs of lorem ipsum about Donec and metus. By February 2014 it had been replaced with a precise one: "After 7 years, 6 months, and 20 days of service, ClaimID has ceased operations. It was our pleasure to help hundreds of thousands of people manage their online identities."

That count is what dates this grave. Subtract it from the 10 December tombstone and you land on 20 May 2006, which is the day of the first capture the Internet Archive ever took of the site. A service whose entire purpose was telling you which parts of the record were really yours left behind a record precise enough to date its own birth.

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