What do you do with the Visual Thesaurus? No, really. What do you do with it?

When I first stumbled upon the Visual Thesaurus, I was so engrossed that I watched the whole demo -- a flower of synonyms bloomed onscreen, each prose petal linked with a colorful filament indicating hyponyms, hypernyms -- basically all the -nyms you could ever want were on display. I watched, mesmerized, as the words shifted around each other, as if in a cool garden breeze.

And then, slightly dazed from the loveliness of the display, I opened a new tab, went to www.thesaurus.com and started looking through lists of words to actually find the one I wanted.

Because, as beautiful as the Visual Thesaurus is, it does not seem, to me, to serve the actual purpose of a thesaurus, which is to help a lowly mortal like myself make the best use of the absolutely astronomical number of words available to an English speaker. Yes, English has a staggering number of words. It is very hard to remember all of them at once and very easy to fall back on the ones you use most often. But one component of good writing is an innovative and rigorous application of our expansive vocabulary, and to that end, I find combing through lists of synonyms to be quite helpful.

The Visual Thesaurus sticks it to traditional thesauri for the long lists I rely on, claiming that by representing the exact relationships between words in a spatial format this tool is more intuitive and thus more useful than some boring list (I mean, when were lists invented, anyway -- the stone age?). And that by somehow recreating the word maps we have in our brains, it will improve the process of...well, the process of what? I use a thesaurus to find the word best suited to my needs. But is that what the Visual Thesaurus is intended to help do? Or does it have another aim in mind? In truth, I'm not sure.

Ultimately, I think this tool is constrained by its design. By eschewing lists in favor of clouds, the number of words that fit on the screen is severely limited. So instead of getting 50 synonyms, you only get 15. And the relationship information doesn't make up for having fewer choices. I don't need a tool to go out of its way to tell me that an individual is a type of witness. That information is already in my brain. I appreciate that the tool is trying to think like me: it's actually kind of flattering. But I don't see the purpose -- unless the tool can think so much like me that it is actually going to write my essay, I would rather it do things that my brain can't do, like store long lists of words!

Is this technology that is still searching for a purpose? Are there other ways of using a thesaurus that I am ignoring? Or is this an example of form winning out over function, a dazzling design that does not get any job done? I'm curious to hear your thoughts!