post formats - where's the difference: "aside" vs. "status"?

Question

As stated in a previous Q, i'm currently getting into post formats and what to do with them. After searching for quite a time through search results and a lot of blog posts, i realized that there's only pretty less written about

What to do with the different post format types?

Post Formats i'm unclear about what they represent:

• 1) asides - "twitter" style messages
• 2) status - "facebook" style messages

Ad 1) When i look at facebook messages, then they contain nearly everything (links, images, status, chat, etc.), so currently it doesn't make much sense for me to see "asides" as facebook messages as every other post format would be a sub-post-format of "asides".

Ad 2) When i take the fact away, that facebook styled messages could contain content of all other post format types, and see "asides" only as representation of the message part, where is the difference to "status"?

Questions:

Ad 1) What is the intended usecase of "aside"?

and

Ad 2) What is the difference between "aside" and "status"

Note: I first thought the problem may be that english is not my mother tongue and translated it - with no result. I even translated my local wordpress install into my native language - with no result.

Answer 1

I think you have this a bit backward:

1) asides - "twitter" style messages

2) status - "facebook" style messages

Think of status as a Tweet or Facebook status update: a text-only or text-and-link-only post of around 150 characters or less (140 seems to be a good number, thanks to Twitter).

Think of an aside as a brief post, of one or two paragraphs, usually without a Title.

The problem with the term aside is that its use (and nomenclature) is not dictated in any way whatsoever by the historical use of the term "aside" in literature, drama, etc.

Instead, the use of the term comes from Matt Mullenweg's personal site. Matt started writing brief, un-titled Posts, which he categorized as "asides". One version of his personal site's Theme (Mazeld, perhaps?) started creating a custom loop for the "asides" and "gallery" categories.

These custom loops became the origination for the concept of Post Formats, and unfortunately, the term "aside" was retained as one of the Post Format types.