Yahoo wants people to start chatting again using its chat program Yahoo Messenger. On Thursday, Yahoo revamped the chat program that has been around since 1998.

Yahoo has not been actively maintaining the Messenger program for the last couple of years, but now they want to compete with Facebook's Whatsapp chat app and Snapchat, CNet reports.

The Yahoo Messenger updated app is available on the Web through Yahoo's email service, on Apple iPhones and on smartphones that run the Android operating system.

Yahoo hopes that the new features it has put into the new Messenger will encourage people to use the service.

First, users can now unsend messages at any time. This means they can take back something they typed before their recipient sees it, or they can unsend a message that they regret sending months later. No other chat service allows messages to be retracted like that.

Users will also be able to send hundreds of images at one time in a quick process. To do this, Yahoo Messenger will convert the images to low resolution and then replace them with the original high resolution images once the download is complete.

Finally, the new Messenger allows users to "like" messages, just like they can for tweets on Twitter and photos and posts on Facebook. Users can also add GIFs to their messages and a video service is coming soon.

Yahoo wants to bring back Messenger, a product it has had for almost 20 years, and stay competitive. Yahoo saw how profitable the Whatsapp service was when Facebook purchased it for $19 billion last year.

"We already have a Yahoo Messenger in the market that we have not been maintaining actively for the last couple of years," Shoemaker said. "This gets us back in touch with the market."

Yahoo says it has "millions of" Messenger users.