Is Google Me getting closer? Maybe. Google has bought social networking start-up Angstro and hired its founder Rohit Khare as it continues to challenge Facebook. This follows some changes it made last week to Orkut, which is fast losing ground to its US rival.

Angstro is a service for delivering highly focused and relevant search results about a person’s professional network.

Khare has already joined the search giant and is reportedly working on Google’s still unconfirmed social network Google Me.

On his blog, Khare wrote, “While our work here may be done, the struggle for open, interoperable social networks is still only just beginning, and I’m looking forward to working on that in my new role at Google.”

Earlier this month, Google pulled the plug on Google Wave adding to speculation that Google Me was on the way. The company announced that it will no longer continue developing Google Wave, but will maintain the service until end of the year for other use in Google projects.

Last week Google introduced some tweaks to Orkut. It made it easier for Orkut users to share their comments, photos or links to one set of friends rather than all of their friends in the network.

Those changes to Google’s Orkut came as Facebook surpassed it to become the leading social networking site in India for the first time leapfrogging former leader Orkut in terms of active visitors last month.