For whatever reason, I just wrote another post about features and ways to distinguish this product from the competition in their other thread (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4049752).
You can also have things private and/or shared with a select group of people, which is what I usually do.
For example, a common use case I've found is that I'll clip something from Gilt/other signup required sites, to show someone a deal they might be interested in, but they don't want to sign up just to look at it. If they like it, they end up signing up.
So the clips aren't totally live - if you are sharing content that is somehow walled off.
You make it sound like the snippets are static caches of content.
Sometimes those snapshots are not valuable after a while, so I delete them :)