I have tried, Prezi — you can’t say I haven’t tried. But I’m done with you now.

The core idea of Prezi is a terrific one: allow people to create presentations based not on static slides but on dynamic visualizaton of ideas, and then make those presentations available online. Wonderful! Fantastic! Why didn’t anyone think of it before?

But see, it doesn’t work. There are many problems, but let’s boil them down to two.

One: So you create a Prezi that shows all these ideas in spatial relation to one another — but when you look at a whole Prezi each component is so small that you can’t see what anything is. And then when you zoom in on an individual component it’s impossible for anyone lacking an eidetic memory to remember how it’s related to all the other components. So you really end up with nothing more than slides, but slides that are supposed to be in significant spatial relation to one another, which makes you feel uneasy and inadequate when you can’t discern that relation.

Two: The way Prezi zooms around makes me seasick. Actually physically queasy.

All the recommended Prezis on the website have these problems, including the demo created by Prezi’s makers. So while I’d like to say, Prezi, that it’s not you, it’s me … I really think it’s you.