Except it's explicitly not meaningless to other users, the opposite is the case, and there's buckets of usability research on this backing it up (both WPTS and Alertbox have good stuff on it).

I would love to read an article on this so if you have a link (I couldn't find anything on either site) that would be great since I really really fail to see how "Imaginary Footlights" can be more useful than "joseph_dunphy" and would like to see some arguments for it.