Engadget is reporting that users of the handsets are claiming their Peek devices stopped working on January 30. Some users are understandably upset as they paid $299 for the device with “lifelong service” on the T-Mobile network.

Some users had received emails about the shutdown of service for Peek devices, but obviously not all of them got the memo.

Peek’s CEO, Amol Sarva, made a statement telling customers that the devices have been abandoned. They are “seriously old” after all since two years is a long time in Internet years.

To lessen the pain for those who paid $299, users still got 28 months of quality service from a machine that could only send tweets. Those who were paying $19.95 a month for the service, however, must be feeling pretty silly now

The company, as their Web site indicates, is fully committed to their new “genius cloud” service instead of the hardware market.

Sarva explains that the company could not maintain the Peek network forever for just a few users. The adoption of their software by already established phone manufacturers has made the Peek-made device obsolete. They have no plans to offer a new device to replace the old defunct ones.

A somewhat happy end to this story, however, comes from The Verge who reports that Sarva is offering free Peek devices they have lying around to interested hackers. Sarva says that the notion of “a pre-built and tested portrait QWERTY device with a jog dial, QVGA display, ARMv7 processor, and a GSM radio is, in many ways, a hacker’s dream.” He’ll even throw in some tools to sweeten the deal.

Those interested should contact Sarva himself at Amol@peek.ly. He’ll hook you up with one of the company’s developers for a free Peek.

Email marketing service provider Aweber, which boasts over 110,000 small businesses as clients, started using the beta in December.

Justin Premick, AWeber’s Director of Education Marketing, tells WebProNews, “In December 2011, AWeber began using Google AdWords’ email subscription beta through our account representative. We started out using it only for a segment of our campaigns, to minimize the risk of it cannibalizing link clicks and not providing valuable, converting traffic. Thus far, we haven’t seen a ton of traffic from the campaign, but we’ve learned a few things along the way to shape our future use.”

“Like other companies, we started using the ads to build our email list,” he adds. “While this is one way the service can be used, I believe the tool is most useful for sales teams in capturing and distributing leads among a team of sales representatives. In a situation with sales managers and representatives, the manager would presumably distribute leads among the representatives for individual follow up.”

“This is helpful for advertisers and prospects because it cuts one step out of the information request (and lead generation) process,” says Premick. “Instead of clicking through to the site, then filling out a form, prospects can fill out the form directly in the search results.”

The company said that after using the new AdWords feature for a month, it plans to continue testing and experimenting, moving away from automated follow up and towards individual outreach.

“Most importantly, this new AdWords feature points to the fact that email remains a key ingredient to marketing success, serving as a valuable tool for building relationships with both current and prospective customers,” an Aweber spokesperson said.

Indeed.

Well, it’s officially 2012. And now that we are four weeks in, it’s the perfect time to get organized so you can make the most of the year ahead.

That’s why this week, the Gmail team is taking part in the 5th annual Clean Out Your Inbox Week, a week dedicated to clearing out the clutter and getting your inbox organized. Whether you get hundreds of emails a day or just have past messages loitering in your Inbox, Clean Out Your Inbox Week is a great opportunity to do that email organization you’ve “been meaning to do.”

According to a Google+ post, the Gmail account will be posting a new tip each day this week to help you de-clutter your inbox. Today’s tip involves archiving and searching:

Archive and Search tool: Clearing out the clutter in your inbox is an important part of staying organized. But sometimes there are emails you don’t want to trash: important documents and records, things you might need for future reference, and messages with sentimental value from the people you care about. Gmail’s Archive button lets you safely tuck those emails away, clearing up space in your inbox so you can focus.

And finding them again is easy with our Search tool (made even better with Gmail’s new look!). Click the down arrow next to the Search box in your Gmail, and you quickly search your emails by recipient, sender, time, subject, or content.

Google also wants Google+ users to get in on the action by posting their own inbox cleanup tips and tricks with the hashtag #GmailCleanup.

I’m happy to report that my inbox number is currently under 100. Take that, clutter.

First would be the addition of a settings page, which lets you choose if you want to sync 7, 14 or 31 days worth of email. “So the next time you get on an airplane, you can sit back and tackle up to 31 days of mail all while offline,” says senior software engineer Dave Stewart.

With the app, attachments are now downloaded and available for offline use. This should be incredibly helpful for those wanting to actually view the content of their email.

Messages and attachments download at a faster rate, Google says.

There are also some bug fixes and keyboard shortcut support has been added.

“If you have keyboard shortcuts enabled in Gmail, your setting will transfer over to the Gmail offline app,” says Stewart. “If you’re not sure what you can do with keyboard shortcuts, try pressing ‘?’ next time you’re using Gmail or Gmail offline.”

Google says the improvements will be there the next time you open the app.

It’s not set in stone yet. This may or may not become widely available to all advertisers, but I’d be surprised if it didn’t open up to a wider set. Here’s what the ads look like:

Notice the “privacy” link. If you click that, it says, “When you submit this form, your email address will be sent to the advertiser.”

The testing has been going on for a little while, but from the sound of it, it’s expanded a bit. Alexia Tsotsis at TechCrunch shared the following statement from a Google spokesperson:

“We’re currently running a small experiment of a new ad format that helps users sign up more easily for email subscriptions or other free newsletters. This new ad format contains a box within the ad that displays a user’s Google email address (if logged in). If a user chooses to click ‘Subscribe to newsletter’ then the email address is sent to the advertiser directly, which is clearly disclosed within the ad itself.”

Some email marketing firms like VerticalResponse, Constant Contact and AWeber are already using the ads.

While social networking continues to rise, email and search are still the most popular online activities, and these new ads take advantage of both. Look at this graph Pew put out a few months back. You can see how social media is growing, but look at how search and email are doing.

Social is not killing email, by any means.

But, interestingly enough, there is still a social element to these ads as well – the +1 button. Really, you’re getting the best of all three worlds (OK, maybe not the “best”. it would probably be better if they also had Facebook like buttons, retweet buttons, and StumbleUpon butons alongside the +1, but Google+ is growing like a weed, and the +1 has ramifications for organic search ranking).

These ads could be the best search-driven tool for driving email sign-ups ever available. We’re talking prime real estate on Google SERPs to drive an opt-in path directly to people’s inboxes.

This will no doubt be an incredibly popular ad format for Google, and I can’t imagine them not making it widely available.

Really, it should be a great thing for the entire email marketing industry. It may never even occur to people searching for various topics that there are even email newsletters related to what they’re looking for. They simply may never have thought to look for one. These ads will put them directly in front of users’ faces. This could very well lead to a lot more content being consumed by email at a time when many have suggested that social networks would all but kill the channel (clearly this is not happening).

Think about it. Let’s say you are a huge fan of the Detroit Lions (full disclosure: this applies to me). What if you were searching for Lions-related content on Google, only to discover that there is an amazing newsletter about the team that you had no idea existed. You might want to sign up for that.

Looks pretty legit to me. It was even sent from nytimes@email.newyorktimes.com, which is a pretty valid sounding email address. There’s even all that legalese small print at the bottom. But… I don’t subscribe to NY Times. I have an account with them so I can occasional comment on articles, but I am on the cold side of their paywall so I wasn’t really sure what to make of this email. I almost wondered if I was supposed to be mistakenly receiving the New York Times while on someone else’s dime and so I immediately strategized how I might take advantage of this mistake. Three seconds later, however, I ignored the email. Then it became clear that lots of other people received this email too much to other recipients’ confusion. Of course, mass confusion amounts to speculation that The Times’ database got hacked.

In other words, nobody knows what’s going on and so chaos is on our doorstep.

Three hours later, however, The Times posted an explanation of the whole snafu in which they own up to being the authors of this spam.

The New York Times said it accidentally sent e-mails on Wednesday to more than eight million people who had shared their information with the company, erroneously informing them they had canceled home delivery of the newspaper.

The Times Company, which initially mischaracterized the mishap as spam, apologized for sending the e-mails. The 8.6 million readers who received the e-mails represent a wide cross-section of readers who had given their e-mails to the newspaper in the past, said a Times Company spokeswoman, Eileen Murphy.

“We regret that the error was made, but no one’s security has been compromised,” she said.

At nearly the same time, The Times issued the following email to the recipients of the confusing email from earlier today:

Intriguing!

Actually, it’s not intriguing at all. It’s the anti-intrigue: turns out that it was a Times employee that accidentally sent the email, which resolves the question of whether it was Epsilon Interactive, the service used by The Times to interact with subscribers, that got hacked. I’d hate to be the poor intern (I’m presuming it’s an intern) who accidentally emailed millions of people that has to answer for this anti-event. It may be the employee’s fault that the readers got an erroneous email, but how hard is it for readers to dismiss a strange email and send it to the Trash bin? Are people really that easily perplexed by questions for which they already know the answer? No, you don’t subscribe to The Times, then you probably still don’t subscribe to The Times. Yet people got so confused and ensnared on the mystery of whether or not they could actually remember if they were subscribed to The New York Times in the first place so, as if victims of a bewitching goblin spell, they could not bring themselves to snap out of it and simply click Delete. And we’d never have to think about this moment ever again. It would’ve been so easy and yet, here we are at the end of the work day and people are still talking about it. Like me. So it goes.

In a study yet to be published in the Journal of Business Ethics, researchers found that people are much more likely to lie if they are behind the text wall as opposed to communicating face-to-face or even talking on the phone.

Here’s how the research was conducted:

140 students were gathered to interact in a sort of role-playing game that put them in a situation where lying would prove fortuitous. One student was given the role of a stockbroker and the other student played the prospective stock buyer. The stockbrokers were told that the stock they were trying to sell would depreciate in value 50% in the next week. They then “gave the stockbroker a financial incentive to sell as much of the bad stock to the buyer as possible,” says the LA Times.

What they found shouldn’t come as a massive shock to anyone. The stockbrokers were more likely to lie or “engage in duplicitous behavior” if they talked about the sale via text message, as opposed to other more personal methods of conversation.

When you think about it, it makes sense. With a text message, you don’t have to look the person you’re lying to in the eye. Hell, you don’t even have to hear their voice. It’s easier to lie when they other person can’t see that you’re nervous – that your palms or sweaty or you’re stumbling over your words.

The counterintuitive find from the study deals with people’s reaction to being lied to. The buyers reported being more angry when they were lied to via text message.

Of course, this flies in the face of the common wisdom that one of the worst things you can do to a person is look them right in the eye and lie to them.

“What we speculated was going on is there is some instant rapport-building, and some quick trust that happens when you talk to someone face to face, and it acts as a buffer and an inoculation — almost like a vaccine — against negative reactions. People are still angry or upset if they are lied to face to face, but when they are lied to in the leaner communications, they are more angry,” said researcher Ronald Cenfetelli.

I wonder if these findings translate to emails as well. I guess it really might piss people off more when they are deceived in an email. My mother did always say, “If a person looks me square in the eye and lies to me, at least I know it had to be worth it.”

Google had gone without offering an iOS app until just last month. The concept was greeted rather warmly by iPhone and iPad users, but the product not so much. It was full of bugs, but Google did launch an update shortly thereafter.

That didn’t curb all of the criticism, but that’s virtually impossible anyway.

Anyhow, today they’ve announced a new update.

With the new version, Google has added the ability to set custom signatures for mobile messages and vacation responders. These can be accessed through the gear icon at the top of the menu view. They also added improved labels with support for nested labels.

There is new notification sound for iOS 5 users. Google says it makes it easier to distinguish when you’ve received an email.

You can now open up a canvas and scribble messages that will be attached to emails. The feature, also available from Gmail for Mobile, supports different colors, brush sizes, lines, erasers and spray paint.

“It’s perfect for sending a quick sketch that is hard to express in words or adding a fun graphic to make your email more personal,” Google says in a blog post.

The company says it is also continuing to work on other highly requested features like banner notifications, multiple login support and the ability to send as from any account.

The new update is for iOS 4 and up.

Last December, Google offered military families free $10 international call credits with the goal of helping soldiers stay in touch with their families as they were deployed around the world. Shortly thereafter, Google decided to just offer free calls from Gmail for the U.S. and Canada.

Now, a year later, Google announced that this will continue. In a post on the Gmail Blog, the company says:

As the holiday season approaches, we’re happy to announce that we’ve extended free domestic calls within the US and Canada for 2012.

This is our way of helping you connect with friends and family across the country. And you can still call the rest of the world from Gmail at our insanely low rates.

No word on other countries.

Do you ever use Gmail to make calls? Let us know in the comments.

Ghubril said the emergence of Internet handles is “not that far off.” He predicted that by 2016, 20% of cell phone numbers will be displaced by Internet handles. His prediction is fueled by the fact that smartphones and other wireless devices are exploding in use, with a greater dependency on messaging and applications such as video chat than on traditional voice communications.

Now that more adults are using the Internet for leisure and fun than ever before, it seems like a natural progression that in the near future we’ll be exchanging screen names instead of email addresses and phone numbers. Still, it seems like a a great leap to assume that humans will simply not care for telephone numbers anymore. Will people really start to perceive telephone calls the same way we regard snail mail today? Ghubril seems to think so:

The value of a handle could become so important in coming years that parents might consider adding the handle to a child’s birth certificate, he said.

Given that detail of Ghubril’s prediction, it sounds like he’s been reading Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We.