Ning, the largest provider of customizable social network software, just raised $60 million, on a pre-money valuation of $500 million, so says Venture Beat. This on top of $44 million on a $170 million valuation back in July, 2007. In a generally depressed venture environment, according to the Industry Standard, this is a pretty important indicator.

This editorial in AlwaysOn runs counter to the skepticism around social networking bubble hype, and points to the very legitimate upside of Ning and social networking in general.

What’s the nuance? Ning’s success rides on the trend of people moving away from massive centralized networks like MySpace and Facebook, and toward smaller, focused, vertical networks that connect people with more affinity and coherence. More and more people are approaching us with queries on how to integrate social networks into a meaningful business model, which is the next major hurdle once you grok the idea of vertical social networks.

But the scariest nuance is the quote from Marc Andressen in his note to VentureBeat:

We raised the money to enable us to keep scaling given our accelerating growth (over 230,000 networks on Ning now, growing at over 1,000 per day) and to make sure we have plenty of firepower to survive the oncoming nuclear winter. At current growth rates, we don’t need it to get to cash flow positive, but having lived through the last crunch, it’s good to be conservative with these things.