By now you'll have seen a squidoo lens or two pop up while you are checking the search engine result pages. Others have written about how useful they are finding squidoo. At first I assumed all the good squidoo pages would have been taken. This is not the case though. Whatever your topic there is probably going to be a good keyword or a long tail phrase still available. Squidoo has checks in place to reduce squatting. You can only have a handful of unimproved pages at one time. So go see if your words are there before someone else does!
To be honest I have never saw a Squidoo lenses searching for something in Google. Don't know if it's just me or...
While googling my target words I have seen squidoo appear in the top 10 twice in the last 2 months. I wouldn't write it off before it has reached maturity.
I made a Squidoo lens last December, and it now regularly in the top 10 in Google SERP for some long tail keywords. It is also PR 3. The lens is: http://www.squidoo.com/becomeaneggdonor/