Online polls are great.  They let you see how you compare to a broader audience.  But, what is really important is how you compare to your peers, or your circle of friends.  This is especially true when it comes to your personal finance questions.

Because of this, we are very excited to announce that we have connected your Facebook Friends to our interactive polls which we call Stackers.

Here is how it works:

• If you are a Facebook user, login into FiLife with your Facebook Connect account
• Answer a question like How much did you pay to get your taxes prepared?
• When you see the results, all your Facebook friends who have also taken the poll will be grouped by their answers so you can compare yourself
• We don’t show your friends’ actual answers, just their relative grouping

Here is what is looks like with some of your Facebook Friends in the results page:

We think this gives you a much better idea of how you stack up.  So get out there and create some polls.

As always, send us any feedback.

The FiLife Team

If there is one consistent piece of feedback, it’s that people love our Stacker characters.  They are cute, affectionate and make financial data a little more fun.

So, we decided to make our Stackers even better.  Over the last few weeks we have been working to make them customizable, portable and easier to understand.

With the new version of the Stacker you can:

• Create a stacker of your very own
• Invite your friends to take it
• Post it to your blog, social network profile or personal page

Ever wonder how much your friends spend on eating out? What about how much they spend at the bar during a weekend? Find out the answers and ask some questions of your own. We’ve also created list of the newest and most popular Stackers.

If you want, you can embed those questions anywhere you want.  Like here.

Got feedback? Let us know what you think via our contact us page.

Have you recently lost your job?  Are you looking get more education to compete in the new economy?  If so, FiLife is here to help.

Today we launched two new features to help you in your search:

• FiLife University (FiU) - information for almost a thousand educational courses from leading institutions like NYU, Boston University and Gonzaga.
• FiLife Jobs - Over 5 Million job opportunities to help you find the perfect job (or a place to weather the storm).

We have added these great resources to complement our existing Job Search Help Center and our Layoff Help Center.  We hope you find these tools useful and help you on your path to a health financial life (or as we like to say FiLife).

Let us know what you think via our contact us page.

Keep your eyes on this blog as we have some great features coming along soon.

Are you a writer, either professionally or just for fun?  Do your friends consider you an expert in personal finance, or just money matters?  If the answer is ‘yes’ and you are interested in making a little extra cash (and who isn’t in this economy), then we should talk.

We launched our newest feature today, the External Contributor Program.  We are looking for people with writing experience and personal finance knowledge to write articles and guides to show alongside our content from the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch and Barron’s.   You can help people in the FiLife community find their way in these troubled financial times and, better yet, you can make some additional money to put under the mattress (just kidding).  We will share the advertising revenue from your contributions, so the more people that find it useful, the more money you make.

If you’re interested, check out our External Contributors Page and apply today!