I'm not quite sure what you mean. Your clips can be private and shared with a few people (or none), or they can be completely public. In the example I gave, I wouldn't really mind if they were public, but I don't see a reason to make them public - it is just to share with a few friends, really.
I might have misunderstood the product. I assumed (though this would be tough), that when you took a snippet of a page, and say the page updated later on - the snippet would reflect the change.
You make it sound like the snippets are static caches of content.
Yes, that's my understanding as well. That's also what I want. I'm taking a snapshot in time of a page, so that I can then go back to that snapshot and look at it.
Sometimes those snapshots are not valuable after a while, so I delete them :)
So the clips aren't totally live - if you are sharing content that is somehow walled off.