‘This season’s essential partywear’ the tag exclaimed as a jaunty yellow arrow pointed towards the man’s tee shirt. ‘If you take a picture of me drunk and put it on Facebook I’ll kill you with this hammer,’ the garment read.

Facebook has become a universe all of its own. It is the pivot on which lives now turn as daily routines are drawn by the pull of its gravitational force. Friendships are forged at the click of a button, flirtations made on the touch of a mouse and the world is made aware of our movements twenty-four hours a day.

But this icon of social-networking sites is the happy upholder of a modern-day paradox. It may bring together friends and colleagues to proximities that leave them but the click of a keyboard away, but, in doing so, constructs a ‘community’ woven from threads that are, ultimately, superficial interpretations of the living, breathing men and women they represent. The social network has created a gulf between who its members are and the images they project of themselves like no other, and has allowed it to flourish.

But, things are changing; the juggernaut of cyber social life has at last been made flesh by the cozy establishment of one Lebanese entrepreneur. For the past six months, Facebook Pub has been happily patching up the fissure between the people we are and the people Facebook would have us be in a corner at the far end of Beirut’s Rue Monot. This is a reality-check for the Internet networking goliath and the results bring the snapshots Facebook gives of its members’ lives to bristling life.

Virtual reality and the real world, it would seem, are happy bedfellows and have enjoyed each other’s company in a small corner of the capital since January 2008. The effects of this happy marriage take the packagable frivolity of the social networking phenomenon and set it free, allowing the cyber world to echo the real, and vice versa.

Gimmicky? A little. Ingenious, Facebook Pub most certainly is as this small hostelry brushes the dust off the theme-pub concept and turns it on its head.

The purveyors of Beirut’s nightlife do not do things by halves, and neither does Facebook Pub. It embraces the Facebook concept with gusto, interprets it with understated flare and tints it effortlessly with Beirut’s acute sense of how to enjoy itself.

Crisp, sharp lines lead revellers into the narrow space of the main bar, decorated in Facebook’s trademark royal blue and white. A wall on the upper floor is emblazoned with the ubiquitous logo and the white and blue theme is carried through in the upholstery and fittings throughout the DJ room on the first floor.

But Facebook Pub’s friendship with the original concept is not skin-deep. Almost every element of the networking site, which has around sixty million active members, has been incorporated into the four walls of Facebook Pub.

The Poke, the crowning glory of e-flirtation, becomes a shot - a spicy, put-hairs-on-your-chest concoction of spirits and pickles. The Lick, the crowning glory of e-indecency, also comes in a shot glass. The drinks menus are formatted like pages from the site and The Message is also there, in the form of small white cards passed through the crowds from the author to the recipient by the bar staff. The Wall, too, makes an appearance, in the form of one of the pub’s actual-walls and a guestbook, and both become the snapshots of life their electronic counterparts are; ‘The best pub in Beirut on the best day in Lebanon’ one happy customer wrote on the 21 May, the day the Doha Accord was announced.

Photos, the bread-and-butter of any Facebook profile (an average of 250 thousand photos are uploaded onto Facebook every day) are also a staple of the Pub. Staff snap away throughout the evening and upload the smiling faces of their patrons onto the screens in the upper and lower rooms. If only these LCD screens were framed by a YouTube-type detail, the package might be complete.

But perhaps that would be crossing the line. Facebook Pub walks a tightrope spanning ingenuity on one side and gimmickry on the other, but it knows exactly how to keep its balance in an environment that has set tongues a-wagging across the city and further a-field.

“We want to keep it simple, a funny idea,” owner Charbel Mounnes told Ya Libnan, hinting that plans are afoot to expand and enhance the idea. “We are looking at creating a Wall on the outer facade of the building,” he told Ya Libnan, “where people can leave messages for their Facebook friends and their ‘real’ ones.” The seed of an idea to expand the Facebook Pub concept has also been sewn, Mounnes says. “We’d like to be in a bigger place where we have different rooms, like you have on Facebook; bachelor rooms, singles rooms, rooms for specific groups like the website has.”

So it seems the only way is up for one of the newest jewels in the crown of Beirut’s party landscape. Facebook Pub’s heady mix of a popular idea interpreted creatively in a new context is testament to the sparkling results that can be achieved when two worlds collide.

Tags: Beirut, Downtown Beirut, Facebook, Monot, Nightlife, Social Networking, source: Ya Libnan, Technology, Tom Lewis