It was around this time last year that the mobile app Meerkat first pushed its curious little noggin through the Texas soil at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, giving livestreaming a crucial shove.

At the time, livestreaming was already mounting toward something approaching a stride via the likes of Livestream and Ustream, services that gained most of their visibility by scooping the media on breaking news — from broadcasting police-scanner activity as the aftermath of the Marathon bombing unfolded to going deeper inside the discord in Ferguson, Mo. This swift surge of livestreaming’s relevance fueled debates over whether these portals into unfolding news served to introduce more clarity or more noise.

Meerkat arrived as an attempt to lighten up livestreaming by skewing more interactive and chatty, and piggybacking atop the bustling social media hub of Twitter. With a tap, Meerkat users could broadcast live video and audio straight from their phones and into the feeds of their followers. (And not just horrible stuff, you guys, fun stuff too!) In the party zone bubble of SXSW, the sudden fun factor of livestreaming spread like wildfire.

That is, until Twitter disabled Meerkat’s access to its social graph in advance of launching its own proprietary and strikingly similar service, Periscope.

From there, the race between the two apps was seemingly on, and it appeared that Periscope, with its relentless procession of celebrities (and push notifications), had run away with it. (Even if Twitter isn’t the soundest social media foundation to stand on.)

But suddenly, it’s a different race.

Just last week, Facebook announced it was extending the livestreaming capabilities it introduced in December and had initially reserved for celebrities, public figures, and verified accounts to all US-based iPhone users, with an Android compatibility and worldwide expansion soon to come. Much like Periscope and Meerkat, live broadcasts feature a field of live comments from viewers. But unlike those two apps, which vaporize videos after a given timeframe, Facebook streams live on indefinitely on the poster’s timeline.

As a network that already reports upward of 100 million hours of video watched every day, and as the place where all of your friends spend most of their idle/juicy undocumented virtual time, this is big.

It’s easy to imagine the grander possibilities of this expansion: white-water rafting with your more adventurous brother from the dry comfort of your desk chair, sharing a sunset view of the Grand Canyon with your vacationing mother while you’re stuck commuting home on the Red Line, or living vicariously through the phone of some idiot running with the bulls in Pamplona.

But the content that we can expect to emerge will likely be far less exciting. In the same way that Instagram slowly transitioned from a hub of photography enthusiasts into an international gallery of lunches, livestreaming won’t necessarily revolutionize the quality of what gets posted to Facebook. But it will change what gets posted to Facebook.

As our digital lives turn increasingly documentary — from our status updates to our Snapchat stories — we are growing more comfortable basking in the beams of surveillance, as long as we’re the ones holding the camera. And as the dimensions of what can be captured and shared change, so too does our inclination to occupy them — meaning that given the opportunity to broadcast ourselves doing nothing in particular, a good many of us eagerly will. (Take the bustling live-gaming community of Twitch as evidence of the entertainment to be found in the unplumbed depths of other people’s idle time.)

My first foray into Facebook livestreaming was an experiment of sorts. For a splash of meta, I decided to livestream myself in the process of writing this piece, both to see what qualifies as worth watching among members of my friendzone and to see just how naturally I could operate in front of an invisible audience.

At first, it was tough pretending that I hadn’t just propped up the little fourth wall of my iPhone in front of me — and for a while, sitting there on camera felt like acting like I wasn’t acting. I was both the subject of a temporally unbound selfie and a host callously neglecting his guests.

But like any good actor, eventually I managed to forget the camera was rolling. From time to time, I’d glance over and note with shock that three dozen people were actively watching, some commenting, one even sharing this breathtaking live footage of me drinking coffee and absently staring into my laptop. Some came in, sat for a spell and left; some sent a like or a poke to register a hello; some asked what album I was listening to (the copyright issues destined to rear up around livestreaming will be fun), and my husband just left me up on his display like a screensaver while he ate lunch.

According to a tally I received afterward, more than 220 friends had sat for a spell with me by the time Facebook’s 30-minute cap mercifully put a stop to the broadcast. But while the comment section on the video was a wash of consensus that this now-forever-preserved 30-minute stretch of my morning was deeply, almost punishingly boring (“Show sucks,’’ read one; “Take your shirt off,’’ read another), I couldn’t shake the residual feeling that I had just spent quality time, however passive, with friends I hadn’t seen in years.

Livestreaming will be sold as an exciting way to put viewers in the center of the action, and to allow each of us the chance to report live from our lives. But I suspect the real value of livestreaming among friends will less about action and more about ambience. It offers us a new level of access, yes, but it also presents a new kind of presence. I, for one, could get used to an Internet that’s more about keeping company than keeping tabs.

Michael Andor Brodeur can be reached at mbrodeur@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @MBrodeur.