The two most important announcements for us players summarized, for the lazy:
1. Minecraft is gaining Twitch.tv integration.
- You can stream directly from the game to your Twitch account, no external software needed
- Yes, it will allow you to natively hook up a mic and talk if you want
- If you want you can still use external software though
- You can also mix and match as you want, for example: having the Twitch chat integrated into the game without using the integrated streaming function
2. Mojang hired two new employees specifically for working on Minecraft.
- Ryan Holtz, also known as
@TheMogMiner. As a rendering engineer he will aim to improve Minecraft's engine in terms of performance and capabilities.
- Michael Stoyke, also known as
@SeargeDP. And for all those of you who did not shit a brick the moment you read the name, let me explain: this is the guy who's been almost singlehandedly holding up the entire modding community all this time. He's the guy behind MCP, the "Minecraft Coder Pack" - the deobfuscated Minecraft source code that makes modding possible in the first place. Without something like MCP, mods would not exist. Forge itself would not exist. And now he's working for Mojang, with the intention of improving mod support and driving forward the Plugin API. And don't worry, he's still doing MCP as well - now with more insight and access than ever before. For myself, that's probably the most exciting news of the entire con.
EDIT: fixed derp
