Google Ceased to Send Traffic to Squidoo Pages?

Squidoo has been penalized by Google most likely due to spam on Squidoo pages (lenses). It happened on 7th July, nearly all the Squidoo lenses (pages) that use to rank top 10 were dropped by Google according to an investigation by Tubbynerd.com.

For the past 6 months, Squidoo lenses have been ranking well for different keywords and niches in Google. And most of the owners (lensemasters) get their Squidoo lenses in top 10 without requiring any SEO work and effort. They rank well easily and gain consistent free Google traffic by just picking the right keywords for the title of their Squidoo lenses. This has long discovered by webmasters and online marketers who then used Squidoo as a tool to generate traffic and income by creating a number of lenses in different keywords and niches in the hope that Google will pick some of their lenses for first page ranking.

But now it seems that Google don't like what the Internet marketers have done, probably due to the lack of helpful and quality content in the Squidoo lenses.

Is Squidoo still helpful to Google SEO?
Squidoo is still inside Google index with PR 6 and their pages (lenses) are free for anyone to create in any topics. So it is still a great tool to gain free one way link for Google SEO.