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With winter behind it and spring in the air, Google Fiber is gearing up to extend its broadband and video service packages to almost two dozen "fiberhoods" in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas.

For the spring, Google has set deadlines for 18 fiberhoods on the Kansas side, with customers in four areas – Plaza at Speedway, Stony Point, Melrose and Rainbow Ridge – having until May 30 to make their service selections, before wrapping up spring sign ups on June 20. In Missouri, Google Fiber has pegged May 23 sign up deadlines for the Wornall Homestead and Crossroads fiberhoods. The installation process is already underway in four fiberhoods in Missouri (Crown Center, Midtown, Sunset Hill and South Plaza West; and in seven areas in Kansas (Hanover Heights, Dub’s Dread, Piper Schools, Delaware Ridge, Painted Hills, Open Door, and Arrowhead).

At Google, we are passionate about speed and making the web faster. A faster web is better for both users and businesses - faster pages lead to better user experience and improved conversions. The Site Speed reports in Google Analytics give every website owner detailed data on the speed of their web pages, as experienced by real users.

Last year, we published a study on the speed of websites around the world based on one week of aggregated Site Speed data from opted-in web publishers. Over the last year, we have seen significant improvements in the core infrastructure that powers the Internet: the web browsers have gotten faster; there have been quite a few LTE/4G deployments making mobile networks a lot faster; and processing power on mobile devices continues to increase at a rapid pace. To determine whether these improvements in technology are making the web faster, we present recent Site Speed data and compare it with the data from last year. While access from desktop is only a bit faster, it is still impressive given that the size of the web pages have increased by over 56% during this period. It’s great to see access from mobile is around 30% faster compared to last year. This is evident from the histograms below as well. For desktop, there is not a significant change in the bucket distributions, but for mobile we see a shift from slower buckets (i.e. higher page load time) to faster buckets.

Most Americans now know the feeling of typing something into a social media input box, thinking again, and deciding against posting whatever it was. But while it certainly seemed like a widespread phenomenon, no one had actually quantified the extent of this "self-censorship." But now, new research based on a sample of 3.9 million Facebook users reveals precisely how widespread this activity is. Carnegie Mellon PhD student Sauvik Das and Facebook's Adam Kramer measured how many people typed more than five characters into Facebook content-input boxes, but then did not post them. They term this "last-minute self-censorship."

Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) and the National Association for Multi-Ethnicity in Communications (NAMIC) will once again conduct a joint workplace diversity survey for the next editions of the WICT PAR Initiative and the NAMIC AIM (Advancement Investment Measurement).

The survey will be funded through a grant by the Walter Kaitz Foundation. NAMIC and WICT have engaged Mercer, a leading global consultant on human capital issues, to conduct the joint survey. The survey will benchmark data vital to the advancement of gender and ethnic diversity in the cable telecommunications industry and, for the first time, will utilize diversity data that takes into account geographical distinctions. The survey activation period will begin in April, with data collection being facilitated for approximately eight weeks. Mercer will distribute the combined survey and independently manage the development of customized reports for each organization.