Tracking or Following - What is the difference?

Question

The following is copied from the Jive documentation:
You have two ways to keep important things on your radar: you can follow activity or track it. Tracking is for crucial need-to-know. Following is for keeping up in a looser sense.
Tracking routes activity from individual documents, discussions, and places into your Communications page, where you'll see it alongside @mentions, direct messages, discussions you contributed to, and any other activity that you're directly involved in. The Communications page alerts you of how many new items you have, and also lets you read-track your updates so you can be sure of reading everything that comes in. Click Track in Communications in the Action menu for any item you want to track. To stop tracking it, just click Stop Tracking. The updates you have will stay in your Communications, but no new updates will be shown there.
Following filters your activity stream so you see the people, places, and items you're interested in, but without the urgency of tracking. Just click Follow in the Action menu for any item that interests you. As the people and groups you follow create new documents and make discussions or blog posts, and as documents you follow are updated, any updates about them will flow into your Activity page under Followed Activity. You can use following to keep up with people, places, and documents you're interested in, but not absolutely required to keep up with. To stop following an item, click Following so the button changes to Follow.
Question A: So what is the real difference?
From what I can gather, I have tracking and following buttons all over the place, regardless of whether I read a particular thread or browse spaces.
Does following mean it also follows any new documents that people create? So for instance, let's assume I follow the Database General space, does it mean that not only will I receive notice about documents updates, but also follow all the people and receive notice of anything they do? WTF. Why would I ever want that?
Question B: How can I clean my "Communications List".
Apparently the options to Stop Tracking or Stop Email Notification don't remove items in my Communications space. How to get rid of it? I will end up with a huge list after some time. Please, I don't want that, it becomes useless!
Question C: E-mail clutter
Ever since using the new forum software, my mailbox is cluttering up with notifications of any thread I created or participated. I explicitly select the Stop email notifications button of several threads, but I believe some default needs to be changed here. I do not automatically want any email notifications, unless I specifically tell it to do so.
Conclusion:
It seems following and tracking creates a personal communication space similar to the following picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024_-_transparent.png
(you may need to copy and paste the link to a different browser window as it does not seem to open from the forum space, at least not for me.)
Sorry, I don't need an OTN pocket universe.  And besides, it's not my problem, but I hope a couple of month down the road this forum will still be able to cope with all the intercommunication tasks with acceptable performance.
I hope there is just some misunderstanding on my side here, and perhaps I will get used to all the additional info - I will probably never need. But, I think the concept of Watching a thread and having a simple Watch List, used in the previous version, or following a user, was just about enough and a lot easier to understand and manage than the new Tracking or Following concepts or features of this new software. I also used the previous Watch List for bookmarking important links, a feature which is apparently supposed to be under the Browse menu, but disabled.
Message was edited by: Dude
The FAQ, which seems it was updated for the new forum software, desrcribes the term Watches.  For instance: "To add a thread to your watch list, click on the Watch This Thread link at the top of the thread page." Is this some work in progress, or obsolete? Where is it?

Answer 1

You have two ways to keep important things on your radar: you can follow activity or track it. Tracking is for crucial need-to-know. Following is for keeping up in a looser sense.
Tracking routes activity from individual documents, discussions, and places into your Communications page, where you'll see it alongside @mentions, direct messages, discussions you contributed to, and any other activity that you're directly involved in. The Communications page alerts you of how many new items you have, and also lets you read-track your updates so you can be sure of reading everything that comes in. Click Track in Communications in the Action menu for any item you want to track. To stop tracking it, just click Stop Tracking. The updates you have will stay in your Communications, but no new updates will be shown there. (Note that if you track a space, you won't also be tracking its subspaces.)
Following filters your activity stream so you see the people, places, and items you're interested in, but without the urgency of tracking. Just click Follow in the Action menu for any item that interests you. As the people and groups you follow create new documents and make discussions or blog posts, and as documents you follow are updated, any updates about them will flow into your Activity page under Followed Activity. You can use following to keep up with people, places, and documents you're interested in, but not absolutely required to keep up with. To stop following an item, click Following so the button changes to Follow.