This was originally posted on the Social Times. We have reposted the full article below.

LivingSocial, the company know for their suite of social discovery applications made popular on Facebook, has released an iPhone application which was available tonight. We previously wrote about the company when they raised $5 million from Steve Case and D.C. based Grotech Ventures. The application integrates all of the channels currently provided by LivingSocial including books, music, film, dining, gaming, and drinking. One of the best components is that their dining application actually enables users to review from the phone!

For some reason Yelp decided not to include this functionality in their mobile edition, making it impossible for users to review on the go. One other cool feature is the ability to take photos and upload them directly to restaurants when you are visiting them. This is a pretty powerful feature. Personally, I believe that the dining, reading, and drinking components of this application will be most used as they are activities that people do while on the go.

That’s not to suggest that the other components won’t be successful but I have a feeling that these 3 channels are the most significant. This is a giant step for LivingSocial though as they strive to make social discovery a completely ubiquitous activity, accessible from anywhere. This application immediately takes advantage of the reviews provided by millions of users across social networks and LivingSocial’s destination site.

There were most definitely a few bugs when trying out the first version of their mobile application though but as most iPhone applications have the first time around. Most of the bugs stemmed from load-time issues. Additionally, I think that having people fill out an entire registration form is excessive. Perhaps there would be one option to tie the phone number to an account?

Whatever the case is, the LivingSocial application is currently one of the best social recommendation applications that I’ve seen. Given that they already have a large inventory of reviews, the application is pre-populated with valuable data. If you have an iPhone and want to have recommendations on the go, go download the LivingSocial iPhone application.