Not in the way Furball is a fan of some lucky person on AOL chat, no.
But it was an example where I once saw his name in the text buffer, saluting somebody else, and I didn't want to to say high because the s were already exchanged between him and the other guy. And recently I've seen a couple of names in the chat buffer that I might have wanted to say "hi" to, but wasn't on ch.200 (and didn't want to tune to ch.200).
So it's an honest request.