I think instead of maintaining a single friendRelations table containing a list of relations of all users on my network it would be better to make a separate Relations table for each user on network, that contains profileIDs of all people & groups the user chooses to follow.
This way retreival would be quite faster...
Remember that databases are generally quite good at indexing (assuming you give them suitable columns to index) so retrieval for a specific user should be fast in any case. Creating a bazillion tables may be slower overall.