Every now and then someone will poke their head and claim that email is dying or is dead. Almost two years ago Business Week predicted the death of email and the rise and rise of IM, wikis and blogs in its place. A year before that technology pundit Stowe Boyd forecasted that 2004,

will be the year when it becomes truly obvious … that email’s days are numbered. Not that it will disappear — surface mail and fax will linger on due to the long-tail of communication media — but it will clearly be a byway, and not the highway, for communication and collaboration.

Now ValleyWag has dredged up the first actual statistics that I have seen, in defence of its claim that “email is dying as a form of communication”:

I’m not a statistician, but it seems that there are least two things to say about this “evidence” from Valleywag.

1. The chart displays the amount of traffic – or “hits” – to email services and to social web sites. The number of times a person visits his or her email service provider may not be a safe indicator of the value that person places upon email, nor of the frequency with which email or other forms of online communication are used. All it shows is that people in the UK now visit social web sites more often than they visit their email service providers, which is… well…. unsurprising.
2. The general trend is not one of social web visits supplanting visits to email service providers, but of supplementing them. As the social web site traffic grows, visits to email service provider do not decline by a corresponding amount for most of the graph.

If there is eveidence for the death of email, this is not it.