How good are rss feeds?

Yes, I am a late bloomer. It takes me a little while to catch on sometimes when I'm preoccupied by alot of other things. But now that I've learnt how to use the feed reader in IE7 properly - it kinda saves me heaps of time and shows me info I want when new stuff becomes available - rather then wading through masses of irrelevent stuff. Why didn't anyone tell me about this before!?!?!