Tonight Facebook will debut an entirely new Facebook Profile during an interview on 60 Minutes (which explains why Facebook was weirdly encouraging all Facebook users to watch the show late in the week).

The update itself is a welcome overhaul of the look of the basic profile, drawing the viewer into a more image-related experience (such as your favorite authors rendered as their Page icons rather than words – thankfully you can edit the priority of the images shown now, not just a random sample of “Liked” elements as before).

It also brings a few new tricks – or at least tricks new to Facebook that might remind you of a few other social sites. One such feature: “Highlighting” your top connections. As they say themselves:

Relationships with close friends can be just as important as family. Now you can highlight family members and the other key people in your life, like your best friends or coworkers — all right on your profile.

Sounds an awful lot like MySpace’s Top 8, eh? I can imagine the arguments already as we shuffle our best friends, kids, spouses and drinking buddies in a furious drive to avoid conflicts…

This “highlighting” comes from a tweak to the Friends List feature, allowing you to share your Friend Lists more like Twitter Lists. This makes your curated personal lists to potentially become a way for you to find similar interests, people, etc. (The new Facebook List features are well profiled at the blog Stayi N’ Alive.) Of course, you can never share your Lists and there’s a bevy of privacy controls to go with the new options.

There are lost of other smaller changes. My particular favorite is the “Projects” you can add under your employers – drawing attention to what you’ve worked on and who with, giving an interesting kind of due and credit to a particular idea or execution.

To see the new features and immediately update your own profile, visit: http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/

See the Facebook video on the changes here:

And to see the 60 Minutes Interview, see the two parts embedded here at Business Insider with some comentary on how Zuck came across.

-Dean (@dbrowell)