The Internet of Things is in great need of organization. And there is no shortage of outfits who would like to control it. Apple thinks your iPhone or iPad should be the central hub of the Internet of Things in your home and recently released HomeKit on June 2, 2014 so that developers can connect their apps and devices more easily to the iPhone. Apple also introduced HealthKit as a way to tie fitness apps and devices together. Just three weeks later, on June 23, Google’s Nest countered with its own developer kit for smart things in the home and Android Wear was announced on June 25 as a way to tie together all the smart things on your body.

The activity around the Internet of Things is starting to reach a fever pitch, and not just among the Silicon Valley giants. Last week, while I was on a DEMO Tour in San Francisco, at least 4 out of the 10 pre-launch startups I met with were building devices or software for the Internet of Things. And at Tim O’Reilly’s annual Foo Camp Unconference, June 20-22, where attendees suggest their own sessions, the Internet of Things dominated the agenda.

As the hubbub around the Internet of Things continued to bubble up over the week, a few things became clear to me.

1. The Internet of Things means different things to different people. For Nest, it is home automation. For GE, it is industrial automation. For Android Wear, it is a bevy of personal fitness trackers on your body.
2. Nobody can agree on how the Internet of things should be connected or controlled. Companies that make devices want their smart device to be the hub, whether that is a phone, smart watch or smart thermostat. Others feel that smart things should simply connect to the Internet like any other computer. While Alasdair Allen, the hacker behind the open-source Thing System, for instance, thinks that smart things should primarily connect to each other.
3. Everyone making anything remotely smart wants to be at the center of the Internet of Things so that they can graduate from device makers to a platform. Mostly at this point, the Internet of Things is largely a battle for the hearts and minds of developers—the people building all of those smart things that will seek to connect with one another. Positioning their device or software at the center gives companies like Apple and Google a shot at becoming the hub of the Internet of Things

For Apple, this is not the first time they’ve tried the hub approach. Remember back before the iPhone when the Mac was supposed to be the “digital hub” of your personal home network and everything else was supposed to connect to it—your digital camera, your camcorder, your TV. Well, that didn’t happen. But now the iPhone can become that hub and there are many more devices that can connect to it—from smart locks to heartrate monitors. But now Google, and Nest in particular, want a shot to be the hub as well.

I am not sure we need a hub. What we do need are standard ways for these devices to talk to one another and, more importantly, to talk to the internet. After all, these are just computers. Why can’t the internet be the hub?