The new update adds:

•Added tameable wolves
•Added cookies
•Sleeping in a bed now resets your spawn position
•New Minecraft logo
•Holding shift while climbing will hang on to the ladder
•Spiders will no longer trample crops

Unfortunately, the Statistics and Achievements have been postponed until a later update due to the lack of time to finish them, Notch states in his latest post "We didn't quite have time to finish them this week, and didn't want to delay the update longer."

* Implemented a new lighting engine with the help of MrMessiahs (can be turned off)
* Changed the options around, added a new “Graphics options” button
* Added beds. If all players in a map sleeps in a bed during night, the game immediately skips until morning
* Added three new half-size blocks
* Added Delay/Repeater redstone dust blocks
* Added whitelisting to the server. To use, enter “whitelist <cmd>” where cmd is “on”, “off”, “add <player>”, “remove <player>”, “list” or “reload”
* New save file format, old maps need to be converted (that might take a while..)
* It’s now possible to have more than five save slots, and to rename saves
* Scrollbars in both the texture pack list, and in the map selection screen
* Replaced the Mojang splash image to reflect the new logo colors
* .. and a bunch of bug fixes and tweaks!

Read more on http://notch.tumblr.com/post/3446675806/minecraft-beta-1-3

The next epoch is upon us! The skies are trembling, pigs are growing wings, and the nether is turning awfully cold, as Minecraft slowly crawls out of Alpha..

Minecraft will reach Beta status on December 20th, 2010.

With Beta comes a larger focus on polish and content, and we’ll start early on with adding proper modding support with a stable API, and we’d love all input we can get on this from the modders out there. We’ll also add some kind of non-intrusive narrative to the game to help drive the game experience early on, and to provide some kind of late game goal. There will be a bigger focus on testing and stability as well, with more time between updates.

When the game enters beta, the price will rise to 14.95 Euro.

We will also change the license to remove the line that promises all future versions of the game for free. Please note that this change only affects people who buy the game after December 20, so if you got the game for during alpha, you will still get all future updates for free, despite this change. A promise is a promise.
Buying the game during beta will include all updates up until release, of course, and bug patches will be free.

Soon, you will be able to buy gift codes for Minecraft, perfectly timed for the holidays! Even better, if you buy those before December 20, accounts created from these codes will count as alpha accounts, and will receive all future updates for free.

And the next game update (with server-side inventory) is coming next week, before Beta

Merry holidays happy! :D
- Notch (Markus Persson)

ABOUT THE GAME
Minecraft is developed by Markus Persson. It's been under development since about May 10, 2009.

ORIGINS
I started Minecraft after playing some Infiniminer with a couple of people from TigSource. I realized that a game that simple yet that dynamic had a lot of potential to turn into a really great game, and kept coming up with things I wanted to change and stuff I wanted to add.

I had recently quit my job as a game developer to be able to focus more on indie game dev during my free time, and I was looking for a new game to develop. I had a few ideas floating around, but most required really long development times.

These two factors led to Minecraft.

DEVELOPMENT AND PHILOSOPHY
Waterfall is dead, long live agile!

I've got a few plans and visions, but my only true design decision is to keep it fun and accessible. There's no design doc, but there are two lists; one for bugs, and one for features I want to add but think I might forget.
I make sure to play the game a lot, and I've built my share of towers, and flooded my share of caves. If something ever doesn't feel fun, I'll remove it. I believe that I can combine enough fun, accessibility and building blocks for this game to be a huge melting pot of emergent gameplay.

I strongly believe that all good stories have a conflict, and that all good games tell a good story regardless of if it's pre-written or emergent. Free building mode is fine and dandy, but for many people it will ultimately become boring once you've got it figured out. It's like playing a first person shooter in god mode, or giving yourself infinite funds in a strategy game.. a lack of challenge kills the fun.
For survival mode, I'd rather make the game too difficult than too easy. That also means I'm going to have to include some way of winning the game (or some other climax) to prevent it becoming too exhausting.

But if it's no fun, I'll redesign.

THE FUTURE
I plan on developing Minecraft until it's a finished complete game, with a downloadable client (with fullscreen mode), custom key re mappings and possibly modding support.

For as long as people enjoy and purchase the game, I will develop extensions after the game is done. These will be free for anyone who has purchased the game.

Once sales start dying and a minimum time has passed, I will release the game source code as some kind of open source. I'm not very happy with the draconian nature of (L)GPL, nor do I believe the other licenses have much merit other than to boost the egos of the original authors, so I might just possibly release it all as public domain.