Minecraft 1.9 Brings Craftable Friendly Snowmen

Minecraft's 1.8 "Adventure" update offered a wide variety of enhancements to the game, including a half-finished experience point system, new monsters and the excellent "biome" system for more realistic world generation. Notch and the team at Mojang aren't resting on their laurels, though, and a few details about the upcoming 1.9 are trickling out via the ever-talkative Notch's  Twitter account.
It seems that 1.9 will incorporate a new non-player creature: a snowman. Unlike most of Minecraft's fauna, however, snowmen will be friendly and, appropriately enough, craftable by players. Snowmen apparently have something of a death wish and will seek out conflict with Minecraft's more aggressive monsters such as creepers and fling snowballs at them. This does little more than attract their attention, however, since snowballs deal no damage. This behavior could provide some good potential for luring creatures into traps, however.
Snowmen also spread snow to blocks that they walk on, but they'll eventually melt in hot biomes, making them impractical to use as a "tank" companion for the player.
Alongside the snowmen, Notch has also indicated that he'll be tweaking the behavior of the new creature introduced in 1.8: the Endermen. Currently, Endermen have a habit of grabbing blocks and carrying them around, sometimes vandalizing your hard work on a cool construction. Notch admits that this wasn't his best idea, and has decided to remove the behavior in the upcoming patch.