Google on Friday released in beta an upgrade of its on-premises Web analytics software for organizations that prefer not to use the search engine’s online analytics service.

Urchin Software is similar in scope to Google Analytics, but is made to run on an organization’s server, the company said. The new product is available for evaluation purposes and is not recommended for production environments.

Urchin Software, like its predecessor Urchin 5, is built for organizations that have content behind a firewall or have restrictions against using an online service. The software is also good for performing ad hoc historical processing, for storing Web analytics on local servers, and for gathering data for third-party audits, Google said.

Google has helped solved a problem that infects new social networks and applications–how to grow them, and fast.

Google on Friday released the Google Social Graph API, which will allows developers to write apps that can easily link up people on the Web. The API takes the publicly declared relationships about your accounts, on Twitter, MySpace.com, and so on, and then your friends and their accounts, and makes that information publicly accessible for new apps. So, when you join a new network built using the API, you won’t have rebuild your social-network contact list.

A Tuesday deadline has been set in which several leading open-source PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) projects plan to stop supporting older versions of PHP in upcoming releases.

The Go PHP 5 campaign, sponsored by several PHP proponents, is intended to move the PHP developer community fully onto the PHP version 5 platform. Among the projects backing the effort are Symfony, Typo3, phpMyAdmin, Drupal, Propel, and Doctrine. These vendors are committing to use PHP 5.2 in releases developed after Tuesday.

Campaign advocates also have issued an invitation to other PHP projects to participate, and so far, about 150 software projects and about 200 Web hosters have committed.

Most PHP Web applications run in PHP 4 and 5. PHP 4 was released in 2000, while PHP 5 became available in 2004.

“We think PHP is absolutely the platform going forward,” said Mark de Visser, chief marketing officer at PHP tools vendor Zend Technologies, which is supporting the Go PHP5 effort.

PHP 5 features object orientation, for enterprise application development, and Web services capabilities, de Visser said. But adoption has been slow because of issues like Web hosts that offer PHP 4 by default, Go PHP 5 said.