"Dear [first name]," flows better than "Dear [opaque string],".
Really? I've been assuming that addressing people by first name--even people you've just met--is now the default, at least for the United States and Canada. Are you in the USA/Canada, by the way?
I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mrs/Ms./Miss last-name. I know this from old movies.
But I thought that the etiquette has changed completely: First name is fine and last name sounds rather formal. Do others have a different experience?
Nope.
> I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well.
Correct.
> But I thought that the etiquette has changed completely: First name is fine and last name sounds rather formal. Do others have a different experience?
Outside of school/university it's simply presumptuous. Don't do it.
I can't actually remember ever being in a business meeting/academic setting, where Mr. or Ms. was used, at any point. In movies, sure, but it really does seem quaint.
No, it's not. Preferred personal informal names are the norm for anyone you've been introduced to (and are normally part of that introduction); those may be legal personal ("first" in the usual English order) names, but often are legal middle names, derivative forms of either first or middle names, or names distinct from any legal name.
This is incorrect. Calling people by something less formal than Mr./Miss/Mrs. <family-name> is certainly the current norm, but the alternative used is a personal choice of the person being addressed and often different from (sometimes, though far from always, a shortened form of) the legal personal name.
> I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mrs/Ms./Miss last-name.
It remains rude to address someone by less formal terms until and unless you have sufficient contact with them to know the less formal appellation that they prefer you to use. It is more expected now than in the past that people will very quickly accept the use of less formal address and inform you of their preferred form.
It is also more common for businesses wishing to feign familiarity to presume that first name information from a customer registry, credit card, or other source is equivalent to stating a preferred form of address and consenting to have the businesses agents use that form; it is not, and quite a lot of people react badly to it. You would be well advised not to imitate those businesses.
Far creepier is the thing where they use your purchase history to make predictions about your health condition, like where Target would send out baby-related stuff when its algorithms discerned that customers were likely pregnant: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-incredible-story-of-how-t...
Compared to that stuff, "Dear Frondo" seems absolutely benign.
I've no direct experience with, say, Russian or Latin American governments, but cultures that use explicit patronymic or matronymic names might expect that broken out as well.
If you ever need to submit user data to the government (e.g. for tax reasons), and you don't ask your user to break the name apart, then you will necessarily be guessing, which seems strictly worse than just asking them how their name might split.
At the end of the day, if you operate in a given culture, then you need to address those cultural norms. Bending over backwards to support every possible edge case seems unwise if they also happen to disagree with those norms.
At the end of the day there are cultural conventions around names, and various agencies use them. I don't see why software should be explicitly culturally neutral, unless your audience is explicitly a global one (and even then, I think localization is preferable to just sticking names into a single field).
In Ukraine we either have three fields in government forms (Family name, Given name, Patronymic) or two (Family name, Given name), for example on ticket booking forms. Or just one, but you should write names in FGP order.
Funny thing is that patronymic part is left out in transliteration, so in travel documents you see FGP form in Cyrillic and FG form in Latin letters. Transliteration algorithm is a bit funny, so people tend to have different Latin spelling of same name. And even different Cyrillic spelling of same name, depending if it's written in Ukrainian or Russian - Ukrainian, because Russian doesn't have dotted and double-dotted "i", the use "и" instead.
In past the formal way to address people used given name and patronymic, but that's not that true anymore.
In documents, sometimes full FGP form is only used at the start of the document and subsequent uses just include family name and first two letters of given and patronymic name. Tha is the only thing you can safely do automatically. Signatures also use this short form.
Other thing is that, male and female version of patronymic and family name can differ, so you can't even compare names, not just process them automatically.
And the good thing with patronymic names - combination of three names and birth date uniquely identifies 99.7% of voters, so this really matters.
1. Throw an error and won't let me enter my last name as it is supposed to be spelled.
2. Truncate the last part of my last name.
3. Try to be clever and end up shoving the first half of my last name into a middle-name field.
My preference for names, addresses, and other personal data is to stop trying to constrain people to preconceived "standards" and just let them enter their information the way they want it to be.
Normally I just use it with an space in the last name field, but then I get exactly the same problems you mention.
So many mundane things have the "how hard can this be" ..