i wasnt expecting that answer...
how large was your friends table? maybe it was quick when doing friends of friends because the friends table was already wholly loaded into memory?
i wonder if your relationship traversals spanned across different tables, if postgres would still be as quick?
I really liked the cypher query language of neo4j, it was super easy to learn and is way simpler to express complex traversals across a graph. Writing a query in postgres to traverse a graph isn't as straightforward, and unless you're doing it often will take a long time to get used to.